which You are pleas'd to shine." It shews how strong the influence of fashion can be, when we find such bombast coming from the pen of a man who, only a few lines earlier, has written, with the perfection of simplicity, "Withal, I looked upon Nature as a Treasure so infinitely full, that as all men together cannot exhaust it; so no man, but may find out somewhat therein, if he be resolved to try."
The most important part of this treatise is the account of the comparative structure of roots, to which we will return later, when discussing Grew's anatomical conceptions. With regard to the position of the plant in the soil, he held somewhat mystical views. He believed that the "air-vessels," or tracheal elements, tended to draw the plant upwards, and the roots to pull it downwards. He says, for example, that the upper part of the roots of most seedlings ascend, because the first leaves being large and standing in the open air, "the Air-vessels in them have a dominion over the young Root, and so yielding theselves to the sollicitation of the Air upwards, draw the Root in part after them."
In 1675 appeared Grew's third botanical work, The Comparative Anatomy of Trunks, which dealt with stem structure, as the previous work dealt with root structure. There is, in the British Museum, a particularly interesting copy of this book, which is elaborately annotated in manuscript. From internal evidence it seems almost certain that this is the author's copy, corrected in his own handwriting[1]. Some, though not by any means all, of the corrections are identical with the alterations found in the 1682 edition. Above the first plate is written "vide ye Book Interleavd," and we may perhaps hazard the guess that in this copy we have Grew's first suggestions, whilst those which he finally adopted in the second edition were inserted in the interleaved copy whose whereabouts, if it still exists, is unknown at the present time.
Pl. 6 shews a typical page from the annotated copy. At
- ↑ By the courtesy of the Council of the Royal Society, I have been able to compare these annotations with certain manuscript letters of Nehemiah Grew's preserved in the Society's Library. This comparison confirms the view that the annotations are in Grew's own handwriting.
