Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/254

 If the views of Malpighi and Grew agreed in the main on the points here mentioned, yet the style and manner of the two were very different. Malpighi kept more closely to that which could be directly seen; Grew delighted in tacking on a variety of theoretical discussions to his observations, and especially endeavoured to follow the path of speculation beyond the limits of what was visible with the microscope. Malpighi's account reads like a masterly sketch, Grew's like an elaborate production of great and almost pedantic carefulness; Malpighi displays a greater formal cultivation, and deals with the questions with light touches, allusively, and almost in the tone of conversation. Grew on the other hand is at pains to reduce the new science to a learned and well-studied system, and to bring it into connection with chemistry, physics, and above all with the Cartesian philosophy. Malpighi was one of the most famous physicians and zootomists of his time, and treated phytotomy from the points of view already opened in zootomy; Grew too occupied himself occasionally with zootomy, but he was a vegetable anatomist by profession, and gave himself up, especially after 1688, almost exclusively to the study of the structure of plants with a devotion hardly to be paralleled till we come down to Mirbel and von Mohl.

As in medicine in the 17th century human anatomy was intimately connected with physiology, and the latter was not yet treated as a distinct study, so the founders of phytotomy naturally combined the physiological consideration of the functions of organs with the examination of their structure. Considerations on the movement of sap and on food appear in the front of every anatomical enquiry; relations of structure, which the microscope could not reach, were assumed hypothetically on physiological grounds, although little positive was known at the time about the functions of the organs of plants; hence recourse was had to analogies between vegetable and animal life, and it is true that vegetable physiology received its first great impulse by this means, but occasion was given at