Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/266

 CHAPTER II.

had no successor of note in Italy; in England the new light was extinguished with Hooke and Grew, and has so remained, we may almost say, till the present day; in Holland also Leeuwenhoek found none to follow him of equal rank with himself, and the work done in Germany up to the year 1770 is more wretched than can well be imagined. There was in fact no original phytotomic research in the first fifty or sixty years of the last century; the accounts which were given of the structure of plants were taken from Malpighi, Grew, and Leeuwenhoek by persons, who, unable to observe themselves, did not understand their authors and stated things not to be found in their writings. The feebler and obscurer notions of the older writers were preserved with a particular preference, and thus it was Grew's complicated idea of the web-like structure of cell-walls that made most impression on those who reported him. This state of decline must not be ascribed to imperfect microscopes only; these certainly were not good, and still less conveniently fitted up; but no one saw and described clearly even what can be seen with the naked eye or with very small magnifying power; the worst part of the case was that no one tried fully to understand either the little he saw himself or the observations to be found in older works, but contented himself from want of reflection with most misty notions of the inner structure of plants. It is not easy to discover the causes of this decline in phytotomy in the first half of the 18th century; but one of the most important appears to lie in the circumstance, that botanists, following in