Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/315

 where new views opened before him as a result of his exact observation, he cautiously restrained himself and was generally content to hint at matters which bolder thinkers afterwards proceeded to investigate; such a case occurred in his examination of cell-membranes by polarised light. Hence we miss to some extent the freer flight of imaginative genius in von Mohl's scientific labours; but there is more than sufficient compensation for this want in the sure and firm footing which he offers to the reader of his works; if we pass from the study of the writings of phytotomists before 1844 to those of von Mohl, we are sensible of one predominant impression, that of security ; we have the feeling that the observer must have seen correctly because the account which he gives of the matter before us seems so thoroughly natural and almost necessarily true, and all the more because he himself notices all possible doubts, and lets those which he cannot remove remain as doubts. In these points von Mohl's style resembles that of Moldenhawer, but in von Mohl it attains to a mastery which is wanting in the other.

There is an evident connection between von Mohl's dislike of far-reaching abstractions and philosophic speculation on the results of observation and the fact, that in the course of more than forty years' unintermitted application to phytotomy he never composed a connected general account of his subject. His efforts as a writer were confined to monographs usually connected with questions of the day or suggested by the state of the literature. In these he collected all that had been published on some point, examined it critically, and ended by- getting at the heart of the question, which he then endeavoured to answer from his own observations.

For the purpose of these observations he looked about in every case for the most suitable objects for examination, a point to which former phytotomists, with the exception of Moldenhawer, had paid little attention; he then studied these objects thoroughly, and thus prepared the way for the examination of others, which presented greater difficulties. Every