JF Ptak Science Books Post 1513
Pound-for-pound, hole-for-whole, this well may be the most beautiful book ever written on holes--it is at the very least one of the most beautiful botanical works ever published, which is saying a lot. The point about the holes though is that they are mostly simply there; the author (and no one yet on the face of the planet at that time) didn't and couldn't understand their function as "cells".
Stephen Hales (1677-1761)1, a long-lived medically-trained, amateur scientist and clergyman from Kent, was a pioneering plant physiologist whose widespread interests and experimentation established fundamental areas of that science, and whose overall impact on that field was not to be surpassed by any other individual for hundreds of years. Among his momentous discoveries was his realization that the flower was the sexual organ of plants, which lead to a reorganization of thinking on the life of plants and propagation.
These images come from his Anatomy of Plants, which was published in 1682--the first of which (below) shows a terrifically-sectioned piece of a vine stem, presented laterally-horizontally-laterally. (Grew's monumental work was more or less begun in 1672 with the publication of his The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun, a smallish 200+ page book illustrated with three images, and then incorporated his An Idea of a Phytological History Propounded (1673), and The Comparative Anatomy of Trunks (1675) and ten years more of work and careful observation into the Anatomy, which is a folio-size volume of 83 spectacular engravings and which runs 350 or so pages.) In the work it is obvious that Hales was familiar with the micro-appearance of cells--as was Anton van Leeuwenhoek and of course Robert Hooke, who basically found and named the things in his Micrographia of 1665--but they what they were seeing were the thickened walls of dead cells, and could not have any understanding of what we think of as "cells" today.
Minor point, really, given the overall importance of the work, which was perhaps among the most important publications (including the works by Fuchs, Caesalpino, Malpighi, Ray and the 1483 Theophrastus) in the history of botany from Gutenberg's invention and deep into the 18th century.
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