Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/241

 these increased powers the attention was concentrated on definite points in the object; what was seen was to some extent indistinct, and always only a small part of the whole object; perception by means of the optic nerve had to be accompanied by conscious and intense reflection, in order to make the object, which is observed in part only with the magnifying glass, clear to the mental eye in all the relations of the parts to one another and to the whole. Thus the eye armed with the microscope became itself a scientific instrument, which no longer hurried lightly over the object, but was subjected to severe discipline by the mind of the observer and kept to methodical work. The philosopher Christian Wolff observed very truly in 1721, that an object once seen with the microscope can often be distinguished afterwards with the naked eye; and this, which is the experience of every microscopist, is sufficient evidence of the effect of the instrument in educating and training the eye. This remarkable fact appears also in another way. We saw in the history of morphology and systematic botany that botanists for a hundred years scarcely attempted to make themselves masters in a scientific sense of the external and obvious relations of form in plants, and to consider them from more general points of view. Jung was the first who applied systematic reflection to the morphological relations of plants which lay open before his eyes, and it was not till late in our own century that this part of botany was again handled in a scientific and methodical manner. This extremely slow progress in obtaining a mental mastery over external form in plants on the part of those who are continually occupied with them appears to be due chiefly to the fact, that the unassisted eye glances too impatiently over the form of the object, and the attention of the observer is disturbed by its hasty movements. In direct contrast to this customary want of thoughtfulness in contemplating the external form of plants, we find the first observers with the microscope, Robert Hooke, Malpighi, Grew, and Leeuwenhoek in the latter half of the