Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/83

 had already distinguished, with more care than they had previously received. In his theory of the seed he follows Cesalpino, and adds nothing to him.

There is nothing which more essentially distinguishes the theoretical botany of Jung, and marks the advance which he made upon Cesalpino's views, than the way in which he discusses morphology in as entire independence as was possible of all physiological questions, and therefore abstains from ideological explanations. His eye is fixed on relations of form only, while his mode of treating them is essentially comparative, and embraces the whole of the vegetable kingdom that was known to him. Jung certainly learnt much from Cesalpino; but in rejecting at least the grosser aberrations of the Aristotelian philosophy and of scholasticism, he freed himself from the prepossessions of his master, and succeeded in arriving at more correct conceptions of the morphology of plants. That his mathematical gifts assisted him in this respect is easy to be gathered from his definitions as given above, which bring into relief the symmetry apparent in the forms of stems and leaves. No more profound or apt definitions were supplied till Schleiden and Nägeli introduced the history of development into the study of morphology.

While Cesalpino, Kaspar Bauhin, and Jung stand as solitary forms each in his own generation, the last thirty years of the 17th century are marked by the stirring activity of a number of contemporary botanists. While during this period physics were making rapid advances in the hands of Newton, philosophy in those of Locke and Leibnitz, and the anatomy and physiology of plants by the labours of Malpighi and Grew, systematic botany was also being developed, though by no means to the same extent or with equally profound results, by Morison, Ray, Bachmann (Rivinus), and Tournefort. The works of these men and of their less gifted adherents, following rapidly upon or partly synchronous with each other, led to an exchange of opinions and sometimes to polemical discussion, such as had