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Updated: June 2, 2025
Modern botany began with Ray's "History of Plants," and the researches of an Oxford professor, Robert Morrison; while Grew divided with Malpighi the credit of founding the study of vegetable physiology. But great as some of these names undoubtedly are they are lost in the lustre of Isaac Newton.
On the improvements in anatomy by Malpighi and his followers, the senior professors of the university of Bononia were inflamed to such a pitch that they attempted to insert an additional clause in the solemn oath taken by the graduates, to the effect that they would not permit the principles and conclusions of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, which had been approved of so many ages, to be overturned by any person.
The claims of Santorio are supported by Borelli and Malpighi, while the title of Cornelius Drebbel is considered undoubted by Boerhaave. Galileo's air thermometer, made before 1597, was the foundation of accurate thermometry. Galileo also invented the alcohol thermometer about 1611 or 1612. Spirit thermometers were made for the Accademia del Cimento, and described in the Memoirs of that academy.
One is grieved to think that the grand old man should have gone down to his tomb without the vast satisfaction it would have given to him to see what the Italian naturalist Malpighi showed only seven years later, in 1664, when he demonstrated, in a living frog, the actual passage of the blood from the ultimate ramifications of the arteries into the veins.
"The principle of all things entrails made Of smallest entrails; bone, of smallest bone, Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one; Gold, of small grains; earth, of small sands compacted Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted:" and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim, that "nature exists entirely in leasts," is a favorite thought of Swedenborg.
One is grieved to think that the grand old man should have gone down to his tomb without the vast satisfaction it would have given to him to see what the Italian naturalist Malpighi showed only seven years later, in 1664, when he demonstrated, in a living frog, the actual passage of the blood from the ultimate ramifications of the arteries into the veins.
The observations of Theophrastus are, however, so accurate, so lucid, and so complete that they might well be used as legends for the plates of these writers two thousand years after him. Nathaniel Highmore, A History of Generation, London, 1651. Marcello Malpighi, Anatome plantarum, London, 1675. Nehemiah Grew, Anatomy of Vegetables begun, London, 1672.
Hitherto, ever since the discovery of magnifying-glasses, there had been here and there a man, such as Leuwenhoek or Malpighi, gifted with exceptional vision, and perhaps unusually happy in his conjectures, who made important contributions to the knowledge of the minute structure of organic tissues; but now of a sudden it became possible for the veriest tyro to confirm or refute the laborious observations of these pioneers, while the skilled observer could step easily beyond the barriers of vision that hitherto were quite impassable.
Another feat of this earliest of great microscopists was to dissect muscular tissue, and thus become the father of microscopic anatomy. But Malpighi did not confine his observations to animal tissues. He dissected plants as well, and he is almost as fully entitled to be called the father of vegetable anatomy, though here his honors are shared by the Englishman Grew.
But it does please me to read the first descriptions of parts to which the names of their discoverers or those who have first described them have become so joined that not even modern science can part them; to listen to the talk of my old volume as Willis describes his circle and Fallopius his aqueduct and Varolius his bridge and Eustachius his tube and Monro his foramen, all so well known to us in the human body; it does please me to know the very words in which Winslow described the opening which bears his name, and Glisson his capsule and De Graaf his vesicle; I am not content until I know in what language Harvey announced his discovery of the circulation, and how Spigelius made the liver his perpetual memorial, and Malpighi found a monument more enduring than brass in the corpuscles of the spleen and the kidney.
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