Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/387

BOOK III.] 1. That the first beginnings of vegetable physiology were made about the time that chemistry and physics began to take their place among the true natural sciences, is no proof that they called vegetable physiology into existence. She, like general physiology, mineralogy, astronomy, geography, owed her origin to the outburst of the spirit of enquiry in the 16th and 17th centuries, which feeling the emptiness of the scholastic philosophy set itself to gather valuable knowledge by observation in every direction. It was in the second half of the 17th century that societies or academies for the study of the natural sciences were founded in Italy, England, Germany, and France under the influence of this feeling; the first works on vegetable physiology play a very prominent part in their transactions; not to speak of less important cases, it was the Royal Society of London which published between 1660 and 1690 the memorable works of Malpighi and Grew; the first communications of Camerarius, which form an epoch in the history of the doctrine of sexuality, appeared in the journals of the German Academia Naturae Curiosorum, and the French Academy undertook about the same time to organise methodical researches in vegetable physiology under Dodart's direction, though the results it is true did not answer to the goodness of the intention. This period of movement in all branches of science, when the greatest discoveries followed one another with marvellous rapidity, witnessed also the first important advances in vegetable physiology; such were the first investigations into the ascending and descending sap, especially those made in England, Malpighi's theory which assigned to leaves the functions of organs of nutriment, Ray's first communications on the influence of light on the colours of plants, and above all the experiments of Camerarius, which proved the fertilising power of the pollen. It was the period of first discoveries; the attempts at explanation were certainly weak ; but phytotomy which was just commencing its own work lent aid from the first to physiology, while physics and chemistry could do but little for her. On