Makers of British Botany; a collection of biographies by living botanists
History
Makers of British Botany; a collection of biographies by living botanists
Botanists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Botany -- Great Britain -- History
_The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun_ contains more that is of interest
from a morphological than from a strictly anatomical standpoint,
according to the modern sense of the terms. In botanical language, the
meaning of the word anatomy has become restricted since Grew's time,
until it is now often used to denote microscopic detail alone. Grew
devotes a good deal of space to the study of seed structure, dealing
chiefly with such features as can be observed with the naked eye (Pl.
5). He invented the term "radicle" for the embryonic root, and used the
word "plume" for the organ which we now speak of in the diminutive as
the plumule. The cotyledons he called "lobes," but he recognised that
they might in some cases appear above ground and turn green, becoming
in his terminology "dissimilar leaves." He took the Bean seed as his
principal type, and described it with the lucid picturesqueness which
is so characteristic of his writing. It is, he says[9], "cloathed
with a double Vest or Coat: These Coats, while the Bean is yet green
are separable and easily distinguished. When 'tis dry, they cleave
so closely together, that the Eye, not before instructed, will judge
them but one; the inner Coat likewise (which is of the most rare
contexture) so far shrinking up, as to seem only the roughness of the
outer, somewhat resembling Wafers under _Maquaroons_. At the thicker
end of the Bean, in the outer Coat, a very small _Foramen_ presents it
self: ... That this _Foramen_ is truly permeable even in old setting
_Beans_, appears upon their being soak'd for some time in Water: For
then taking them out, and crushing them a little, many small Bubbles
will alternately rise and break upon it."... The _Plume_ "is not, like
the _Radicle_, an entire Body, but divided at its loose end into divers
pieces, all very close set together, as Feathers in a Bunch; for which
reason it may be called the _Plume_. They are so close, that only two
or three of the outmost are at first seen: but upon a nice and curious
separation of these, the more interiour still may be discovered....
In a French Bean the two outmost are very fair and elegant. In the
great Garden-Bean, two extraordinary small Plumes, often, if not
always, stand one on either side the great one now describ'd." These
two "extraordinary small plumes" are, in other words, the structures
which we should now describe as buds in the axils of the cotyledons.
Grew also notices that two simplified leaves are borne next above the
cotyledons, or, as he expresses it, the "Plume" is "cooped up betwixt a
pair of Surfoyls."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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