Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/565

] 1788, by Smith in 1790, and by others, but without leading to any discoveries respecting the nature of the irritability. Dal Covolo's famous essay on the stamens of the Cynareae (1764) produced no absolutely final result, but it contained some particulars which threw light on the mechanical laws of these movements of irritability. Koelreuter, who studied these objects in 1766, thought less of discovering a mechanical explanation of them, than of finding arguments in the irritability of the stamens for the necessity of insects to pollination. An entirely new kind of movement was discovered by Corti in 1772 in the cells of Chara, which is now known as the circulation of the protoplasm; this form of movement in plants appeared at first to bear no resemblance whatever to the phytodynamic processes then known, and it was not brought into connection with them till a long time after; on the contrary an erroneous idea soon began to prevail, that it was a real rotation of the sap, as understood by the early physiologists; this idea held its ground till far into the 19th century, and being combined with mistaken notions respecting the movements of latex, was developed by Schultz-Schultzenstein into the doctrine of the circulation of the vital sap. For a time indeed Corti's discovery was forgotten, and had to be reproduced by Treviranus in 1811. A somewhat similar fortune attended the discovery of the movement of the Oscillatorieae by Adanson in 1767, which misled Vaucher into pronouncing them to be animals.

3. Imperfect as were the theoretical efforts of the 18th century in this branch of botanical study, yet they aimed at tracing the various movements back to the play of physical forces. But in the closing years of the century another order of ideas, injurious to the healthy progress of science, made its appearance in this, as in other parts of botany and zoology. Even the majority of those who had no sympathy with the nature-philosophy and its phraseology, believed that there was in organised bodies something of a special and peculiar nature; because the attempts made to explain the phenomena of life by mechanical