but a detailed scheme for researches into botanical science,
and more particularly into the chemical part of it. There we
read, that plants must be burnt slowly, in order that the destroying and transmuting power of the fire may have less
effect; the 'virtutes plantarum' play an important part in the chemical examination of plants, and blood was mixed with
their juices, in order to discover their properties. A writer
named Dedu in a treatise, 'De 1'ame des plantes' (1685) derived the generation and growth of plants from the fermentation
and effervescence of the acids in combination with the alkalies, as Kurt Sprengel informs us. It is by comparison with
these and similar notions that we recognise the full superiority
of the utterances of Malpighi and Mariotte respecting the
nutrition of plants, and their sagacity is still further shown by
the fact, that there are some things which they forebore to say,
evidently because they thought that they were not clearly proved.
The views of Malpighi and Mariotte on the nutrition of plants were respected and often quoted by their contemporaries and immediate successors; but as has happened in other cases unfortunately up to recent times, much that was fundamentally important and significant in them was neglected from the first for comparatively unimportant matters, and the views of these clear thinkers were so mixed up with indistinct ideas and actual misconceptions, that no real advance was made, though a variety of new facts were from time to time brought to light. It has been already noticed that Malpighi's correct idea of the connection of the leaves with the nutrition of the plant was at a later time commonly supposed to be equivalent to Major's theory of circulation, and since the latter was for various reasons considered to be incorrect, it was thought that Malpighi's view was dismissed with it. Yet even Major's theory deserved the preference over the views of those who assumed only an ascent of the sap in the wood, because it at least attempted to account for certain phenomena
