JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 501
In 1837 the hemispheric frontal lens for the compound achromatic
microscope developed by Giovan Battista Amici (1786-1863) vastly
improved magnifying power to open an entirely new submicrospic
world--this somewhat on the order of the introduction of Robert
Hooke's (1635–1703), investigation in Micrographia (1655). G.C. Ehrenberg (Die Infusiontheirschen als volkommene Organismen,
Leipzig 1838) was among the first to use this new development, showing
almost immediately that infusoria was not what was seen to be as
Buffon's "organic molecules" (or unified wholes) but something far more
complex. Theodor Schwann and Jacob Mathias Schleiden in just the next
year, using this same new technology, put forward the cell theory, with
images produced in Schwann's Microscopical Researches
(1847)--according to Pearce Williams this development of cell theory
"did for biology what Lavoisier's definition of chemical elements had
done for chemistry". The bottom line here was that the cell theory was
the best, basic element in biology.
All of this to get at dots. My goodness. Before Amici (who by the way
as an astronomer and microscopist, working both ends of the optical
visual field like few before him had), most of these elucidated
complexes seemed to even the slight magnification of earlier
microscopes as dots. Unexplained, seemingly inexplicable, dots. (And
the same could be said too of the planets and stars, and our moon and
sun, before the introduction of Galileo's introduction of the
telescope). Some of the most famous of these post-cell-theory dots
belong to Wilhelm Roux (1850-1924) who in his Über die Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen (1890)
offered the first experimental intervention and experimentation at the
embryological level. The "dots" here are frog cells, half of which
Roux destroyed in his attempt to influence the development of the
embryo. The experiment resulted in some results that would be abandoned within two decades, but the methodology employed by Roux (but not his reductionism) would be one of the most significant biological events in the 19th century.
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