Makers of British botany : a collection of biographies by living botanists / edited by F.W. Oliver.

Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Makers of British botany : a collection of biographies by living botanists / edited by F.W. Oliver. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    at the Linnean Society,—on the very day that Grew presented his treatise in print, the Secretary of the Royal Society received Marcello Malpighi’s manuscript dealing with the same subject. Priority can however be fairly claimed for the Englishman, since he had submitted his treatise to the Society in manuscript earlier in the year. This question of priority, and also the question whether Grew was guilty of plagiarism from Malpighi’s writings, has been much discussed at different times. Schleiden1 in par- ticular brought forward charges of the most serious nature against Nehemiah Grew’s good faith. These accusations were, however, dealt with in detail in a pamphlet by Pollender2 in 1868, and shown to be groundless,—Schleiden’s information about the circumstances being wholly inaccurate. There is now practically no doubt that Grew was an independent worker, and was only definitely indebted to Malpighi, in so far as he himself acknowledges it. In the preface to the second treatise, for instance, he mentions the Italian botanist, and remarks in speaking of the “ Air-vessels ”—“ the manner of their Spiral Conformation (not observable but by a Microscope) I first learned from Him, who hath given a very elegant Description of them.” If Grew had been a wholesale plunderer from Malpighi’s writings, he would scarcely have been likely to have acknowledged indebtedness on a special point. It must be con- fessed, however, that judging by present-day standards of scientific etiquette, Grew should have referred more fully to the works3 of the Italian author, in his final book, The Anatomy of Plants. The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun contains more that is of interest from a morphological than from a strictly anatomical 1 M. J. Schleiden, Grundziige der wissenschaftlichen Botanik, Vol. I. p. 198, 1842. The incorrect statement that Grew was Secretary of the Royal Society at the time that Malpighi’s manuscript was received by that body, is also repeated in the English translation of Schleiden’s work [Schleiden’s Principles of Scientific Botany, translated by Edwin Lankester, London, 1849, P- 38]. 2 Aloys Pollender, Went gebiihrt die Prioritdt in der Anatomie der Pflanzen dem Grew oder dem Malpighi l Bonn, 1868. 3 Marcellus Malpighi, Anatome Plantarum, 2 pts, London, 1875 and 1879 (see also Marcellus Malpighi, Die Anatomie der Pflanzen, Bearbeitet von M. Mbbius, Leipzig, 1901. In this little book the more important parts of Malpighi’s work are translated into German, and a number of the figures reproduced).
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