Page:Makers of British botany.djvu/73

 Rh standpoint, according to the modern sense of the terms. In botanical language, the meaning of the word anatomy has become restricted since Grew's time, until it is now often used to denote microscopic detail alone. Grew devotes a good deal of space to the study of seed structure, dealing chiefly with such features as can be observed with the naked eye (Pl. 5). He invented the term "radicle" for the embryonic root, and used the word "plume" for the organ which we now speak of in the diminutive as the plumule. The cotyledons he called "lobes," but he recognised that they might in some cases appear above ground and turn green, becoming in his terminology "dissimilar leaves." He took the Bean seed as his principal type, and described it with the lucid picturesqueness which is so characteristic of his writing. It is, he says, "cloathed with a double Vest or Coat: These Coats, while the Bean is yet green are separable and easily distinguished. When 'tis dry, they cleave so closely together, that the Eye, not before instructed, will judge them but one; the inner Coat likewise (which is of the most rare contexture) so far shrinking up, as to seem only the roughness of the outer, somewhat resembling Wafers under Maquaroons. At the thicker end of the Bean, in the outer Coat, a very small Foramen presents it self:… That this Foramen is truly permeable even in old setting Beans, appears upon their being soak'd for some time in Water: For then taking them out, and crushing them a little, many small Bubbles will alternately rise and break upon it."…The Plume "is not, like the Radicle, an entire Body, but divided at its loose end into divers pieces, all very close set together, as Feathers in a Bunch; for which reason it may be called the Plume. They are so close, that only two or three of the outmost are at first seen: but upon a nice and curious separation of these, the more interiour still may be discovered…. In a French Bean the two outmost are very fair and elegant. In the great Garden-Bean, two extraordinary small Plumes, often, if not always, stand one on either side the great one now describ'd." These two "extraordinary small plumes" are, in other words, the structures which we should now describe as buds in the axils of the cotyledons. Grew also notices that two