Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/340

320 jelly, and how this view was adopted in all essential points by Mirbel at a late period in the 18th century; how Kurt Sprengel, and with him a number of phytotomists, among them Treviranus as late as 1830, supposed cells to be formed from granules and vesicles in the cell-contents, an idea which Link it is true opposed in 1807, but afterwards accepted to a great extent. Though Moldenhawer as early as 1812 ('Beitrage,' p. 70) distinctly rejected these theories, and published observations which if followed up would have led to the right path, yet the botanists above-named and others with them, long continued to adhere to the earlier views. Kieser, for example ('Memoire sur l'organisation des plantes,' 1812) further developed Treviranus' theory, that the fine granules in the latex of plants are cell-germs which are afterwards hatched in the intercellular spaces. Schultz-Schultzenstein in his work 'Die Natur der lebenden Pflanze,' 1823-28, i, p. 607 rejected this view and adopted that of Wolff and Mirbel. Scarcely better than the notion of cell-germs represented by Sprengel, Treviranus, and Kieser was the theory propounded by Karsten soon after 1840; that of the French botanists Raspail and Turpin (1820-1830), though conveyed in a different terminology, corresponded in its main points with the views of Sprengel.

It had been the good fortune of Mirbel at the beginning of the century, and again thirty years later, to promote the advance of phytotomy by means of important observations, though he may have interpreted some of them incorrectly; the same thing happened again thirty years later, and it was a German enquirer, von Mohl, who corrected his observations and views on both occasions.

In his famous treatise on Marchantia polymorpha, which appeared in 1835 in the Memoirs of the French Institute, the