Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/480

460 parts of the plant, where it is the means of maintaining growth and nutrition. These later remarks also are better than much that was said about the movement of the sap in the 18th and even in the 19th century, and at all events they prove that to speak of Malpighi as a defender of the circulation of the sap in Major's sense, as was often -done in later times, was an entire misunderstanding of his views.

Malpighi published his theory in a brief and connected form in 1671; it appeared again further worked out in detail in the fuller edition of the Phytotomy in 1674 ; he attributed a special value to his discovery, that plants require air to breathe as much as animals, and that the vessels of the wood answer in function to the tracheae in insects and to the lungs in other animals; he recurs also several times to the importance of leaves as organs for the elaboration of the food.

If we compare Malpighi's theory of the nutrition of plants with the views of his predecessors, we cannot help seeing, that it was an entirely new creation, in which Aristotelian doctrines had no share. If his successors had apprehended the important and essential points in his doctrine and had striven by experimenting on living plants to support and illustrate them by new facts, we should have been spared many erroneous notions which established themselves in the theory, and made it a perfect chaos of misconceptions. That particular misconception, which we have already mentioned more than once, namely, that Malpighi, like Major and Perrault after him, assumed a continuous circulation of the juices of the plant, necessarily involved an incorrect idea of the function of the leaves ; that function was by many later writers either quite neglected, or sought for chiefly in transpiration, the chemical activity of the leaves being quite overlooked.

Malpighi's theory can hardly be said to take into consideration the chemical nature of the food of plants; it is chiefly occupied with the relation of the organs to the main points in the nutritive process ; its foundations are for the most part