Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/481

] laid in the anatomy of the plant. Grew, who in all essential points adopted Malpighi's views, but without doing much to advance them by his lengthy discussions on particular questions, made some attempt to extend the knowledge of the chemistry of the subject; but his notions were entirely borrowed from the corpuscular theory of Descartes, and he may be said to have constructed his own chemical processes; the consequence was that he usually overlooked the points that were of fundamental importance, and brought nothing to light that could assist the further development of the theory of nutrition. But there is another writer, whose name is in the present day known to few in the history of vegetable physiology, but whose ideas on the chemistry of plants are of great interest. This writer is, the discoverer of the well-known law of gases, one of the greatest physicists of the latter half of the 17th century, who also enriched the physiology of the human body with some valuable discoveries. We have a tolerably copious treatise of Mariotte's in the form of a letter to a M. Lantin in the year 1679, to be found in the 'Œuvres de Mariotte,' Leyden, 1717, under the title, 'Sur le sujet des plantes.' It is highly instructive to gather from this letter the ideas of one of the most famous and ablest of the natural philosophers of that day on chemical processes and conditions in the nutrition of plants, a few years after the appearance of Malpighi's great work and about the time that Grew's Phytotomy was being published. It is to be expected that Mariotte should give but an incidental and superficial attention to the more delicate structure of