It was mentioned in the Introduction that Moldenhawer may be said to
close the first portion of the period from 1800 to 1840, not only
because the majority of the questions ventilated up to that time were
to a certain extent settled by him, but also because there is no
material advance in phytotomy to be recorded for several years after
the publication of his work in 1812. It is true that Kieser in his
‘Grundzüge der Anatomie der Pflanzen’ (1815) attempted a connected
exposition of the whole subject, but his book offers nothing really
new, being merely a playing with the unmeaning phrases of the current
nature-philosophy, while it revived gross errors like Hedwig’s doctrine
of the presence of lymphatic vessels in the tissue of the epidermis,
and made the Mosses consist of conferva-threads. Phytotomy was on the
contrary really enriched by the miscellaneous works of Treviranus
published in 1821, especially in respect to questions connected with
the epidermis, and by Amici’s discovery in 1823, that the intercellular
spaces in plants contain not sap but air, and that the vessels too
chiefly convey air. We may quietly pass over the later writings of
Mirbel, Schulze, Link, Turpin and others, which appeared after 1812
and before 1830, as our business is not so much with an account of the
literature of the subject as with evidence of real advance.
Meyen and von Mohl may be said to have commenced their labours with
1830, and in the course of the succeeding ten years they became the
chief authorities on phytotomy, though a highly meritorious work of
Mirbel’s on Marchantia polymorpha and the formation of pollen in
Cucurbita falls as late as 1835. We may even pass over so elaborate a
work as the ‘Physiologie der Gewächse’ of Treviranus (1835-1838), which
embraces also the whole of phytotomy, because though its treatment of
some of the details is good, it presents its subject virtually from
the points of view opened before 1812. This work, though it neglects
no part of its subject and contains much useful reference to the works
of other observers, was unfortunately out of date at the time of its
appearance, for owing to von Mohl’s labours an entirely new spirit had
entered since 1828 into the treatment of phytotomy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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