Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/271

 search out the true nature of vegetable cell-structure and to explain it on physical and philosophical grounds. The observations themselves on this point are highly inexact, and influenced by preconceived opinions, and his account of them is rendered obscure and often quite intolerable by his eagerness to give an immediate philosophic explanation of objects which he had only imperfectly examined. His efforts to follow the course of development in the first beginnings of the formation of cell-tissue were evidently not seconded by sufficient knowledge of the structure of matured organs, and, to judge by his figures and by his theoretical reflections, his microscope was of insufficient power and its definition imperfect. Notwithstanding all these deficiencies, Wolff's treatise is doubtless the most important work on phytotomy that appeared in the period between Grew and Mirbel, not, as has been said, on account of any particular excellence of observation, but because its author was able to make some use of what he saw, and to found a theory upon it.

According to that theory all the youngest parts of plants, the punctum vegetationis in the stem, which Wolff first distinguished, the youngest leaves and parts of the flower, consist of a transparent gelatinous substance; this is saturated with nutrient sap, which is secreted at first in very small drops (we might say vacuoles), and these, as they gradually gain in circumference, expand the intermediate substance and so present enlarged cell-spaces. The intermediate substance therefore answers to what we should now call the cell-walls, only these are at first much thicker, and are constantly becoming thinner with the growth of the cell-spaces. We may compare young vegetable tissue, formed as Wolff imagines, with the porosity of fermenting dough, except that the pores are not filled with gas but with a fluid. It is plain from the above description that the vesicles or pores, as Wolff names the cells, are connected together from the first by the intermediate substance, and that one lamina or cell-membrane