Among Henfrey's original contributions other than those dealing with the burning questions already mentioned, was a series dealing with the Anatomy of Monocotyledons. This would appear to have led him on to study the Nymphaeaceae, and especially the anatomy of Victoria regia—a paper which may be compared perhaps with Prof. Gwynne-Vaughan's more recent study. Henfrey was quite alive to the monocotyledonous affinity, and the enlightened and, for that date, unconventional views to which he gave expression, drew an interesting notice by Hooker and Thomson in the first volume of their Indian Flora.
Another of his papers dealt rather fully with the development of the spores and elaters of Marchantia, where he filled in a considerable lacuna in the knowledge of that group. It is curious to find as late as 1855 so intelligent and well informed a botanist as Henfrey laying it down that the cells of Marchantia, in particular, and Liverworts in general, were destitute of nuclei. It is superfluous to say that this apprehension was quite baseless. Indeed, forty years later, the group of the Liverworts was deliberately chosen by Prof. J. B. Farmer, for the investigation of nuclear phenomena on account of the favourable conditions under which they could be studied!
Microtechnique at that time was of course a much simpler affair than it has since become. Contemporary papers as a rule say little about methods; however one of Henfrey's occasional notes in a magazine tells us that caustic potash, iodine, sulphuric, hydrochloric and acetic acids, together with ether were in common use. Schultze's reagent—chloride of zinc iodide—was invented in 1850, but does not appear to have been generally employed till many years later.
It would however be a serious error to underestimate the value of the earlier work in plant histology. The present writer once spent an interesting morning in Pfeffer's laboratory at Tübingen rummaging through hundreds of the great von Mohl's anatomical preparations. Among these were sections of palm endosperms in which the, at that time recently discovered, continuity of the protoplasm through the cell walls was plainly visible. The existence of these filaments had been detected
