He received his licentiate degree from Pembroke Hall, Cambridge University in 1661, and his doctorate in medicine from the University of Leiden (Netherlands) in 1671. He first practiced in Coventry, later moving to London. His studies in animal anatomy led him to the idea of applying the same approach to the study and classification of plants, which resulted in his first work, Anatomy of Vegetables Begun, which was presented to the Royal Society of London in 1672 at the same time as M. Malpighi's manuscript on the same topic.
Main achievements
The main works are devoted to questions of the structure and sex of plants. Along with M. Malpighi, he was the founder of plant anatomy. For the first time he described stomata, the radial arrangement of xylem in the roots, the morphology of vascular tissue in the form of a dense formation in the center of the stem young plant and the process of forming a hollow cylinder in old stems. He introduced the term “comparative anatomy” and introduced the concepts of “tissue” and “parenchyma” into botany. Studying the structure of flowers, I came to the conclusion that they are fertilization organs in plants.
In the work “Anatomy of Plants” (The Anatomy of Plants, 1682). described the microscopic structure of the root, stem, leaves, fruits, seeds, etc. Developed the idea of the unity of the microscopic structure various organs, which he reduced to three elements: “bubbles” (cells), fibers, tubes. described the stomata. He considered flowers to be organs of sexual reproduction in plants.
In 1695, he first isolated from the water of a mineral spring in Epsom a substance called Epsom salt - magnesium sulfate heptahydrate, known as Epsom salt, magnesia (jarg).
- The idea of calling [stamen] with pollen male organ plants, and [the pistil] is female, expressed in The Anatomy of Plants was suggested by Sir Thomas Millington, a surgeon.
Works of Nehemiah Grew
- Anatomy of plants and their development. - (eng. The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun), (1670).
- Philosophical history of plants. - (English: An Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants), (1672).
- Anatomy of plants. - (eng. The Anatomy of Plants), (1682).
Hooke's propaganda of the microscope and the facts he discovered did their job.
Two of his contemporaries were already systematically studying the microscopic and identifying the cellular structure in various plant organs. The simultaneity of their work, due to which even a dispute arose between them about priority, serves as an indicator that the need for the use of a microscope for the study of plants is sufficiently ripe and the value of the new instrument for scientific research was no longer in doubt.
Marcello Malpighi(Marcello Malpighi, 1628-1694) - Italian scientist, one of the most remarkable naturalists of the 17th century. - presented in December 1671 to the Royal Society of London the first part of his work, entitled “Anatomes plantarum idea”. This work is one of the first works where the microscope was used for the systematic study of a specific biological problem. The success of the new tool was brilliant.
Malpighi was a type of encyclopedist scientist characteristic of initial period development of natural science. His interests include practical medicine, anatomy, zoology, and botany. At the same time, for Malpighi, facts come first; he is a scientist working inductively Bacon and is in no hurry to generalize the data obtained.
Italy, where Malpighi was born and worked, was in the 17th century. a country of advanced science, with numerous universities and academies. Medicine was in its infancy at that time. Medical practice was not based on rational foundations, but rested on crude empiricism and traditional, in most cases fantastic, teachings that were not based on data from anatomy and physiology. Malpighi was fortunate to have teachers who were not satisfied with this scholastic medicine based on authorities. One of his teachers, Massari, organized the “Anatomical Choir”, where the young Malpighi took an active part. Here he received a scientific education and a taste for independent research.
Soon after graduating from university and receiving his doctorate in medicine, Malpighi became a professor in Bologna, and then in Pisa and Messina. Beginning in 1662, over the next five years, Malpighi was engaged in a systematic study of the structure of plants. Not limiting himself to the study of features visible to the naked eye, Malpighi studies the microscopic structure of various plant organs.
It is unclear what instrument Malpighi used in his research. Möbius (1937) suggests that it was an instrument made by Diviney.
His work mentioned, like his later work “Anatomy of Plants” (1672-1675), lays the foundations for this area of botany and rightly belongs to the classical scientific literary heritage. Describing the structure of various parts of plants (leaves, bark, wood, etc.), Malpighi notes that they consist of microscopic sacs and tubes. He does not use Hooke’s term “cell” and speaks of sacs or vesicles (utriculi, sacculi), denoting with this name the same thing that Hooke described as cells. As the tables with drawings attached to Malpighi's works show, he clearly saw the cellular structure in various parts of plants. Nevertheless, Malpighi does not make generalizations from his observations, and the facts concerning the cellular structure of plants remain scattered and unsystematized.
Malpighi also did a lot of microscopic examination of animal and human organs. To this day, a number of histological structures bear his name. But the elementary structure of the tissues of the animal organism remained unrecognized by Malpighi. The microscopes of that time, and most importantly the lack of rational methods for preparing organs for microscopic examination, did not make it possible to see cells or at least outline some commonality in the microscopic structure of organs and animals.
The same applies to embryology. Like Harvey, Malpighi is one of the first embryologists; in 1672, his treatise on the development of the chicken, which he studied using a microscope, was published. But here, too, there are no observations about the elementary structures of the developing embryo, which, however, is quite understandable, since it is even more difficult to see embryonic cells than tissue cells of a formed organism.
To summarize, we can say: Malpighi saw cells, but he did not see the cellular structure of plants. N.A. Kholodkovsky (1923) is right when he notes in his biography of Malpighi that the latter “was an active and talented pioneer in the field of histology, embryology and botany, but he can rather be called a forerunner than the founder of these scientific disciplines.”
Malpighi's fame as a pioneer in the field of plant anatomy was challenged by his contemporary, an English scientist Nehemiah Grew(Nehemiah Grew, 1641-1712). Grew began his career as a practical doctor. From 1667 he became secretary of the Royal Society of London, to which in 1671, almost simultaneously with Malpighi, he presented his work “Principles of Plant Anatomy”.
Malpighi and Grew were in many ways opposite figures. Grew justified his studies in science primarily with orthodox motives - comprehension of the work of the creator; Malpighi openly said that the desire to explore is a subjective impulse, which he calls the human itch for knowledge. Möbius (1937) believes that Malpighi was more brilliant, but Grew was more carefully and deeply interested in the subject of his research. One must agree with this opinion. Unlike Malpighi with his encyclopedic interests, Grew is mainly concerned with the anatomy of plants.
Regardless of Malpighi, Gru discovers cells and vessels in plants, describing them in even more detail than the first. To designate cells, he uses the same term “sacs”, “vesicles”, and under this name cells appear almost until early XIX V. According to Grew, the “bubbles” of the parenchyma of plant organs are closed, their walls are not penetrated by pores. Grew compares the cellular structure of parenchyma to beer foam. And again - this is so characteristic of the biology of the century under review - Grew does not make any generalizations regarding the structure of plants from “bubbles”, although he saw them everywhere, which can be concluded from the numerous and beautifully executed drawings attached to his writings. However, compared to Hooke, Grew takes a decisive step forward, since he shows that “pores” (i.e., cells) are characteristic of all plant organs.
Grew is the first to introduce the term “tissue” into biology, which plays such a role important role in modern morphology. However, Gru’s concept of fabric only meant that he imagined the structure of plants to be like weaving textile fabric, like an interweaving of thin fibers running along and across and forming a finely looped network. These fibers bind the sacs, fibers and vessels of plants into one whole. This idea was suggested to Grew by small torn fibers that he observed when dissecting plants.
Comparing the works on the anatomy of plants by Malpighi and Grew, almost simultaneously presented to the Royal Society of London, Sachs (J. Sachs, 1875), the author of an excellent history of botany, notes that Malpighi’s work was rather a brilliantly made sketch, where the author established only the basics of the structure of plants; on the contrary, Grew's work was a manual, carefully worked out in every detail. For the history of cell theory, Grew's works were important primarily as a work that awakened the idea that various plants and their various organs have some common fine structure. But, of course, Grew was far from thinking that the pouches he observed had the significance of an independent elementary anatomical unit. Like Hooke and Malpighi, Grew saw the cellular structure of plants, described it and depicted it in his excellent illustrations, but he did not understand this structure and, in essence, did not know the cell.
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Plant cells were first described by Robert Hooke. He added to his work Micrographia (1665) a large number of tables with beautifully executed drawings.
Hooke did not have any general research plan; Later he never returned to microscopic observations.
Ch. played a huge role in the history of science. XVII "Micrographia", entitled "On the schematism or structure of a cork and on the cells and pores in some other loose bodies." Studying thin sections through cork, Hooke first set himself a certain narrow task: he sought to find out what explains the lightness of cork fabric, its elasticity, resilience and inability to absorb water. On sections of the cork, Hooke discovered under a microscope that it had a very peculiar structure and consisted of completely closed vesicles, or cells (cellula), which were translated by the term “cell”. Hooke also made the first attempt to count the number of cells in a certain volume of a plug. There were 125,712,000 of them in one cubic inch (24 mm). Hooke wrote: “this might seem incredible if the microscope did not convince us of this with obvious clarity.”
Consequently, Hooke imagined a plug constructed from a large number of completely isolated cells, separated by a dense (but very thin) wall of cells. And from here it already became clear why cork weighs so little and why it is easily compressed; This also explains its water resistance.
So, the problem was solved, but Hooke went further. He himself raised the question of how widespread the cellular structure is, whether it is a “scheme” that extends to all plant organs.
For this purpose, he studied sections of the stems of various living plants and discovered similar cells in them, delimited by partitions. The difference between these cells-cells and the cell cells of the cork was that they were not empty, but were filled, according to his assumption, with “nutritional juice”, which, as Hooke assumed, flows from one cell to another, although the pores necessary for this he did not see anything in the walls of the cells.
The most significant thing in Hooke's research is that he also made general conclusions. Hooke formulated the idea of a cell as a cell, more precisely as a bubble, completely closed on all sides. Neighboring bubbles, he believed, were separated by one common partition. Then Hooke established the fact of the widespread distribution of the cellular structure of plant tissues.
It was these two main conclusions that determined the direction of further research in this area.
Already in 1671, the Royal Society of London received two reports on the microscopic structure of plants. These were studies by the Italian Marcello Malpighi and the Englishman Nehemiah Grew. Both of these researchers (they worked completely independently of each other) studied a large number of objects and gave amazingly accurate descriptions and drawings. It is curious that their works bear almost the same title, namely: “Anatomy of Plants,” although one wrote in Latin, and the other in English language. By plant anatomy they understood the study of the cellular (cellular) structure of various plant organs, which they systematically described.
First of all, we note that both of these researchers came to the same conclusion regarding the universality of the construction of plant tissue from vesicles. Grew compared them to foam in a mug of beer. The name “fabric” itself was first introduced by Grew. He believed that plant matter in its structure resembles clothing fabrics. Further, they substantiated the position that all organs of a plant organism always have a certain, typical structure for them.
After the studies of Hooke, Malpighi and Grew, which were widely known at one time, the very fact of the existence of cell-cells in plant tissues was not in doubt. Various authors mentioned cells, but they were not given due importance, and they were considered as one of the structures that (along with tubes and vessels) are found when studying plant tissues under a microscope.
It should also be added that somewhat later (in the 18th century), the view of the Swiss physiologist and poet Albrecht Haller (1708-1777), who defended the theory of the fibrous structure of organisms, became widespread. He himself came to it mainly through speculative means, but many researchers confirmed it with direct observations. The same Felix Fontana, who expressed the deep thoughts cited above regarding the conditional value of microscopic observations, assured that he saw these fibers absolutely everywhere. Some researchers have described fibers even in stones. To a large extent, all this turned out to be fantasy; in any case, the filamentous structures of different bodies cannot be compared with each other, and the similarity, even if it sometimes occurs, is purely external.
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GRU Nehemiah
(Grew, Nehemiah)
(1641-1712), English botanist and physician, one of the founders of plant anatomy. Born September 26, 1641 in Atherston (Warwickshire). He graduated from the University of Cambridge and in 1671 received a doctorate in medicine from the University of Leiden. Member of the Royal Society of London, from 1677 - its secretary. The main works are devoted to questions of the structure and sex of plants. Conducted microscopic examinations of roots, stems, leaves, fruits, and seeds. For the first time, he described stomata, the radial arrangement of xylem in roots, the morphology of vascular tissue in the form of a dense formation in the center of the stem of a young plant, and the process of formation of a hollow cylinder in old stems. Introduced the term "comparative anatomy". Studying the structure of flowers, I came to the conclusion that they are fertilization organs in plants. I identified the calyx, corolla, pistils and stamens in the flower. He developed the idea of the unity of tissue structure, believing that they consist of “bubbles” (cells), fibers and tubes. The main results of Grew's research are presented in the books The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun, 1670, An Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants, 1672, and The Anatomy of Plants, 1682. Grew died in London on March 25, 1712.
Collier's Encyclopedia. - Open Society. 2000 .
See what "GRU Nehemiah" is in other dictionaries:
Grew (1641 1712), English botanist, one of the founders of plant anatomy. Described the microstructure of the root, stem, leaves, etc., and some types of cells (1682). Introduced the concepts of “tissue” and “parenchyma”. * * * GRU Nehemiah Grew (Grew) Nehemiah... ... encyclopedic Dictionary
Nehemiah Grew English Grew, Nehemiah ... Wikipedia
Grew, Grew (Grew) Nehemiah (26.9.1641, Atherston, ≈ 25.3.1712, London), English botanist and physician. Secretary of the Royal Society of London (since 1677). Along with M. Malpighi, he was the founder of plant anatomy. In the work “Anatomy of Plants”... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia
Grew, Nehemiah Nehemiah Grew English. Grew, Nehemiah Date of birth ... Wikipedia
Grew (Grew) Nehemiah (1641 1712) English botanist, one of the founders of plant anatomy. Described the microstructure of the root, stem, leaves, etc., and some types of cells (1682). Introduced the concepts of tissue and parenchyma... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
Nehemiah Grew- (1641 – 1712). English botanist and physician, microscopist, founder of plant anatomy. The main works are devoted to questions of the structure and sex of plants. Along with M. Malpighi, he was the founder of plant anatomy. First described stomata, radial... General embryology: Terminological dictionary
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