Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 23.djvu/174

Greville During his later years he was deprived of much of his private means, and executed many drawings and paintings of highland landscape for sale, some of these being exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy. On 27 May 1866 he was seized with inflammation of the lungs from having fallen asleep on some wet grass, and he died on 4 June at his villa at Murrayfield, whence he had been in the habit of walking into Edinburgh almost daily. He was buried in the Dean cemetery. A son and three daughters survived him. Few men have done as much for descriptive cryptogamic botany in Britain, a fact to which testimony is borne in the name `Grevillea' being applied to the magazine devoted to that study.



GREW, NEHEMIAH (1641–1712), vegetable physiologist, son of the [q. v.], at that time master of Atherstone grammar school, was born in 1641. and baptised at the parish church of Mancetter on 26 Sept. in that year. Obadiah Grew, as a parliamentary divine, took refuge at Coventry in 1642. Nehemiah, like his half-brother, [q.v.], was educated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1661. He himself tells us that he was led to the study of vegetable anatomy as early as 1664, considering that both plants and animals 'came at first out of the same Hand, and were therefore the Contrivances of the same Wisdom,' and so inferring the probable analogy of their structures. Having been encouraged in the study by Henry Sampson, who was nine years his senior, Grew in 1670 put into his hands an essay on the subject, which he showed to Henry Oldenburg, secretary to the Royal Society, who in turn showed it to Bishop Wilkins, who read it to the Royal Society. It was approved and ordered to be printed on 11 May 1671, and the author was elected a fellow of the society on 30 Nov. Meanwhile Grew had graduated M.D. at Leyden in July. He inscribed his name in the Album Studiosorum on 6 July as ' Nehemias Grew, Warwicensis, Anglus, 30, M. Cand.,' and seems to have read his inaugural dissertation on the 14th. It is entitled 'Disputatio medico-physica, inauguralis, de Liquore Nervoso … pro gradû Doctoratûs … subjicit Nehemias Grew, Anglus, è Com. Warwicensi, die 14 Julii,' is dedicated to his father, Dr. Henry Sampson, and Dr. Abraham Clifford, and was printed at Leyden by John Elzevir's widow and heirs. Grew seems to have commenced practice at Coventry, but to have been soon invited to London, the correspondence on this subject being still preserved by the Royal Society. His preliminary essay, 'The Anatomy of Vegetables begun. With a General Account of Vegetation grounded thereon,' was prefaced by a letter to Wilkins, dated Coventry, 10 June 1671, and was published, with a dedication to Lord Brouncker, president of the Royal Society, in 8vo, in 1672. It was therefore undoubtedly in print by 7 Dec. 1671, when Marcello Malpighi's researches in the same direction were communicated to the society in manuscript (cf. A., Wenn gebührt die Priorität in der Anatomie der Pflanzen dem Grew oder dem Malpighi?' 1868). Malpighi subsequently had Grew's book translated into Latin, and he, Wallis, Lister, and Leewenhoek confirmed by microscopical investigation the observations Grew had made with the naked eye. His papers read to the society on 8 and 15 Jan. 1672 appeared with the title 'An Idea of a Phytological History propounded, with a Continuation of the Anatomy of Vegetables, particularly prosecuted upon Roots. And an Account of the Vegetation of Roots chiefly grounded thereupon' (8vo, 1673; folio, 1682); and on 18 April 1672, on the proposal of Bishop Wilkins, he was made curator to the society for the anatomy of plants. Grew issued in 1675 'The Comparative Anatomy of Trunks, with an Account of their Vegetation grounded thereupon,' the plates of which had been laid before the society in the two previous years. The author's corrected copy of this work is in the library of the British Museum. In 1675 he published the first of a series of chemical papers 'Of the Nature, Causes, and Power of Mixture,' read before the society on 10 Dec. 1674. This was followed by `A Discourse of the Diversities and Causes of Tasts chiefly in Plants,' read 25 March 1675; 'An Essay of the Various Proportions wherein the Lixivial Salt is found in Plants,' read March 1676; `Experiments in consort of the Luctation arising from the Affusion of several Menstruums upon all sorts of Bodies,' exhibited to the society in April and June 1676; `A Discourse concerning the Essential and Marine Salts of Plants,' read 21 Dec. 1676; 'Experiments in consort upon the Solution of Salts in Water,' read 18 Jan. 1677; and 'A Discourse of the Colours of Plants,' read 3 May 1677. These seven essays occupy eighty-four folio pages at the end of the 1682 edition of the 'Anatomy of Plants,' where they are printed with continuous pagination, but not in the order in which they were read. Simultaneously with these researches of a chemical nature, Grew was prosecuting with 