Elements of botany and vegetable physiology, including the characters of the natural families of plants, with illustrative figures / By A. Richard, M.D. Translated from the fourth edited by W. Macgillivray, A.M.
- Achille Richard
- Date:
- 1831
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Elements of botany and vegetable physiology, including the characters of the natural families of plants, with illustrative figures / By A. Richard, M.D. Translated from the fourth edited by W. Macgillivray, A.M. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![transparent matter. These cellules, he says, in their qua- lity of transparent spherical bodies, collecting the luminous rays in a central focus, must appear opaque in their cir- cumference, and transparent at their centre, which would lead to the supposition of their being perforated. There are no pores therefore. But it seems to us evident that M. Du Trochet is entirely mistaken. The corpuscules which he has examined, and which he supposes to be the pores described by M. Mirbel, are organs altogether different from these latter. There is no wonder, then, that he did not see them perforated. They are nothing else than the grains of amylaceous matter, or the greenish glandular bodies, abundantly disseminated through all parts of the vegetable tissue, and to which M. Turpin has recently given the name of globuline. M. Du Trochet’s denial, therefore, falls to the ground of itself, as his observations refer to an entirely different organ. Believing that the pores of the cellular tissue are cellules filled with a greenish substance, the able experimenter whom we here oppose, would naturally make application of this observation to the vessels upon which holes or slits have been described. Accordingly, he has asserted that the porous vessels are merely tubes which present some of these globular and greenish cellules more or less symmetrically disposed, and that the false tracheæ, or slit vessels, present these cellules arranged in transverse lines. The author has then examined the nature and uses ®, this greenish matter. Having tested it by chemical re- agents, he found that it was rendered conerete by nitric acid, and that the alkalies again reduced it to its original state. Now, the cerebral substance of animals is affected in pre- cisely the same manner by the same reagents. It therefore follows, that this greenish matter is a true nervous system, or rather the scattered elements of a diffuse nervous system, which is not collected into a mass, but presents itself under the appearance of small dispersed or united points, which ]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33093672_0048.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
