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 preliminary communications, in which they gave a brief summary of the researches they had then made; the fuller and more complete treatises appeared afterwards; the preliminary communications formed the first part of the later works and to some extent the introduction to them. Malpighi's longer account was laid before the Society in 1674, while Grew produced a series of essays on different parts of vegetable anatomy between 1672 and 1682; and these appeared together with his first communication in a large folio volume under the title, 'The anatomie of plantes,' in 1682. Thus Grew had opportunity to use Malpighi's ideas in his later compositions; he actually did so, and the important point as regards the question of priority is, that where he makes use of Malpighi he distinctly quotes from him. No more is necessary to remove the serious imputation which Schleiden has made against Grew in the 'Grundzüge' (1845), i. p. 207.

Whoever has not himself read the elaborate works of Malpighi and Grew, but knows them only from the quotations in later phytotomists, may easily imagine that these fathers of phytotomy had found their way to a theory of the cell, such as we now possess. But it is not so; their works have very little resemblance to modern descriptions of vegetable anatomy; the difference lies chiefly in this, that modern writers in their accounts of the structure of plants start with the idea of the cell, and afterwards treat of the connection of cells into masses of tissue. The founders of phytotomy on the contrary, as might naturally be expected, consider first and foremost the coarser anatomical circumstances; they describe the rind, bast, wood, and pith chiefly of woody dicotyledons, and the histological distinctions between root, stem, leaf, and fruit in their broader relations, and examine the detail of the structure of buds, flowers, fruits, and seeds for the most part only so far as it can be seen with the naked eye. The more delicate structural conditions are afterwards discussed as a supplement to this less minute anatomy and always in close connection with