Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/264

 were treated by him as accessories only to the coarser histological relations with which he chiefly occupied himself.

These two works of Malpighi and Grew, so important not only for botany but for the whole range of natural science, were not followed during the course of the next hundred and twenty years by a single production, which can claim in any respect to be of equal rank with them; that long time was a period not of progress but of steady retrogression, as we shall see in the next chapter. But before the beginning of the 18th century made some contributions to the knowledge of the details of vegetable anatomy, if not exactly to the settling of very important points in it; he communicated his observations on animal and vegetable anatomy in numerous letters to the Royal Society of London, and these appeared for the first time in a collected form in Delft in 1695 under the title of 'Arcana naturae.' It is not easy to gain a clear idea of Leeuwenhoek's phytotomic knowledge from his scattered statements. He too discussed the less minute anatomy of fruits, seeds and embryos, and among other things he made occasional observations on