suggests that the value of putting a Clary seed into the eye to bring out a foreign body, which may have lodged there, is due to the presence of the mucilaginous coat. The same seed is still, I believe, used for this purpose, under the name of "eye seed." Grew understood the difference between seeds with, and without endosperm, and gives perfectly clear representations of such albuminous seeds as Ricimis. He describes the cotyledons of the Dock as being immersed in the endosperm, "as in a Tub of Meal or a little pot of pure refin'd Mould, necessary for the first Vegetation of the Radicle."
Grew naturally reckoned the spores of Ferns among seeds. The seed-case of the Harts-tongue is, he says, "of a Silver Colour…of a spherick Figure, and girded about with a sturdy Tendon or Spring, of the Colour of Gold:… So soon as… this Spring is become stark enough, it suddenly breaks the Case into two halfs, like two little cups, and so flings the Seed," of which "ten Thousand are not so big as a white Pepper Corn."
To give any kind of short summary of Grew's botanical work is well-nigh impossible. Some men are remembered for individual discoveries, and in such cases it is not difficult to give a précis of their contributions. But Nehemiah Grew is remembered because, contemporaneously with Malpighi, he actually created the science of plant anatomy,—a subject which, before his day, was practically non-existent. Modern botanists, conscious how small an addition to the fabric is now regarded as a satisfactory life-work, must stand amazed and somewhat humbled before the broad and sound foundations laid by this seventeenth century physician. It is no less than two hundred and forty years since Grew sent in his first treatise to the Royal Society, so it is scarcely wonderful that a number of his results have been rejected in course of time. It is far more remarkable that so many of his conclusions—and those the more essential ones—have been merely confirmed and extended by later work. Great however as were his actual contributions to botanical knowledge, they were perhaps less important than the far-reaching service which he rendered in helping to free biological thought from the cramping belief that the one and
