BY JULIUS VON SACHS PROFESSOR OF BOTANY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WÜRZBURG AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY HENRY E. F. GARNSEY, M.A. Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford REVISED BY ISAAC BAYLEY BALFOUR, M.A., M.D., F.R.S. Professor of Botany in the University And Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh Oxford AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1890 [ All rights reserved ] Oxford PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY...

Botanical Science is made up of three distinct branches of knowledge, Classification founded on Morphology, Phytotomy, and Vegetable Physiology. All these strive towards a common end, a perfect understanding of the vegetable kingdom, but they differ entirely from one another in their methods of research, and therefore presuppose essentially different intellectual endowments. That this is the case is abundantly shown by the history of the science, from which we learn that up to quite recent times

I am gratefully sensible of the honourable distinction implied in the determination of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press to have my History of Botany translated into the world-wide language of the British Empire. Fourteen years have elapsed since the first appearance of the work in Germany, from fifteen to eighteen years since it was composed,—a period of time usually long enough in our age of rapid progress for a scientific work to become obsolete. But if the preparation of an English transl

The authors of the oldest herbals of the 16th century, Brunfels, Fuchs, Bock, Mattioli and others, regarded plants mainly as the vehicles of medicinal virtues; to them plants were the ingredients in compound medicines, and were therefore by preference termed ‘simplicia,’ simple constituents of medicaments. Their chief object was to discover the plants employed by the physicians of antiquity, the knowledge of which had been lost in later times. The corrupt texts of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Plin

1530-1623. When those who are accustomed to modern botanical literature take up for the first time the works of Otto Brunfels (1530), Leonhard Fuchs (1542), Hieronymus Bock (Tragus), or of the later authors Rembert Dodoens (Dodonäus), Charles de l’Écluse (Carolus Clusius), Matthias de l’Obel (Lobelius, 1576), or even those of Kaspar Bauhin from the beginning of the 17th century, they are surprised not only by the strange form, the curious and unfamiliar accessories from which what is really usef

While botany was being developed in Germany and the Netherlands in the manner described in the previous chapter, and long before this process of development reached its furthest point in Kaspar Bauhin, Andrea Cesalpino in Italy was laying down the general plan, on which the further advance of descriptive botany was to proceed in the 17th and till far into the 18th century; all that was done in the 17th century in Germany, England, and France towards furthering morphology and systematic botany wa

From the year 1750 Linnaeus’ terminology of the organs of plants and his binary method of naming species came into general use; the opposition which his doctrines had till then encountered by degrees died away, and if all that he taught was not universally accepted, his treatment of the art of describing plants soon became the common property of all botanists. But in course of time two very different tendencies were developed; most of the German, English, and Swedish botanists adhered strictly t

The efforts of Jussieu, De Candolle, and Robert Brown were directed to the discovery of the relationship between different species of plants by comparing them together; the doctrine of metamorphosis founded by Goethe set itself from the first to bring to light the hidden relationship between the different organs of one and the same plant. As De Candolle’s doctrine of symmetry derived the different species of plants from an ideal plan of symmetry or type, so the doctrine of metamorphosis assumed

In the years immediately before and after 1840 a new life began to stir in all parts of botanical research, in anatomy, physiology, and morphology. Morphology was now specially connected with renewed investigations into the sexuality of plants and into embryology, and attention was no longer confined to the Phanerogams but was extended to the higher and later on to the lower Cryptogams. These researches into the history of development first became possible, when von Mohl had restored the study o

That the substance of the more perfect plants consists of layers of different constitution was a fact that could not escape the most untutored observation in primitive times; ancient languages had still words to designate the most obvious anatomical components of plants, rind, wood and pith. It was also easy to perceive that the pith consists of an apparently homogeneous succulent mass, the wood of a fibrous substance, while the rind of woody plants is composed partly of membranous layers, partl

The foundation of vegetable anatomy, indeed of all insight into the structure of the substance of plants, is the knowledge of their cellular structure. We find the first perception of this truth in a comprehensive work of Robert Hooke [64] , which appeared in London in 1667 under the title of ‘Micrographia or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses.’ The author of this remarkable book was not a botanist, but an investigator of nature of the kind more especiall

Malpighi had no successor of note in Italy; in England the new light was extinguished with Hooke and Grew, and has so remained, we may almost say, till the present day; in Holland also Leeuwenhoek found none to follow him of equal rank with himself, and the work done in Germany up to the year 1770 is more wretched than can well be imagined. There was in fact no original phytotomic research in the first fifty or sixty years of the last century; the accounts which were given of the structure of pl

There is no sharp line of division between the 18th and the 19th centuries; the phytotomists who appear on the scene during the first years of the new century are scarcely more successful than Hedwig and Wolff; careful and judicious interpretation of their own and others’ observations is still rare, and they are often misled by preconceived opinions. In one respect indeed a very great improvement appeared with the commencement of the 19th century; the number of phytotomists working contemporaneo

In the period between 1830 and 1840 it had come to be understood, that the old theories of cell-formation of Wolff, Sprengel, Mirbel, and others, resting on indistinct perceptions and not on direct and exact observation, could only give an approximate idea of the formation of cells. But in the course of that time really different cases of formation of new cells were accurately observed by Mirbel, and more especially by von Mohl, who described different modes of formation of spores, and in 1835 t

All that was known in the 16th and at the beginning of the 17th centuries of the phenomena of life in plants was scarcely more than had been learnt in the earliest times of human civilisation from agriculture, gardening, and other practical dealing with plants. It was known, for instance, that the roots serve to fix plants in the soil and to supply them with food; that certain kinds of manure, such as ashes and, under certain conditions, salt, strengthen vegetation; that buds develope into shoot

It will contribute to a correct appreciation of the discoveries made towards the end of the 17th century by Rudolph Jacob Camerarius and his successors in regard to the sexual relations of plants, if we first make ourselves acquainted with all that was known of the matter up to that time from Aristotle downwards; we shall learn at the same time how extremely unfruitful was the superficial observation of the older philosophy in a question in which inductive research only could lead to real result

That plants take up certain substances from their environment for the purpose of building up their own structures could not be a matter of doubt even in the earliest times; it was also obvious, that movements of the nutrient material must be connected with this proceeding. But it was not so easy to say, what was the nature of this food of plants, in what manner it finds its way into and is distributed in them, and what are the forces employed; it was even for a long time undecided, whether the f

It will scarcely be doubted at the present day, that the mechanical laws of growth, of geotropic and heliotropic curvatures, of the various kinds of periodic movements, of the twining of tendrils and climbing plants, and of movements dependent on irritation, may be referred to a common principle, and that in all these movements besides the elasticity of the cell-walls the still unknown qualities of the protoplasm play the most important part, and that consequently the ‘streamings’ of the protopl