into German by Roeper and published with many improvements and additions in 1833 and 1835; this was followed by a work on vegetable physiology by L. C. Treviranus, 1835–1838, and lastly by Meyen's 'Neues System der Pflanzenphysiologie,' 1837–1839. These works exhibit the characteristic features of the period chiefly in this, that physiology finds as yet no strong support in phytotomy, while the old views of vital force are brought face to face with more exact physico-chemical explanations of processes of vegetation.
4. We have already pointed out the wonderful impulse given to the study of morphology and phytotomy, of embryology and cells about the year 1840; it was shown also that this was due in a great measure to discarding the errors of the nature-philosophy and the idea of vital force, and requiring in the place of such speculations exact observation and systematic induction, and how Schleiden's 'Grundzüge' soon after 1840 vigorously met the demands of the newer time in these respects, but without satisfying them by the positive results obtained. The rapid progress made by phytotomy and the doctrine of cells in the hands of von Mohl and Nägeli proved specially favourable to vegetable physiology, by making it possible to follow the processes of fertilisation in the interior of the ovule. The formation of the pollen-tube from the pollen-grain had been observed long before 1840, and Schleiden in 1837 had proposed the view that the embryo of Phanerogams was formed at the end of the pollen-tube by free cell-formation after it had entered the embryo-sac. But Amici in 1846 and Hofmeister in 1849 showed that this notion was erroneous, and that the germ-primordium is in existence in the embryo-sac before the arrival of the pollen-tube and is excited by it to further development, to the forming the embryo. Similarly Hofmeister's further observations on the embryology of Vascular Cryptogams and Mosses left no doubt, that the spermatozoids of these groups of plants discovered by Unger and Nägeli serve to fertilise the germ-cell or egg-cell previously formed
