Ralph Cudworth

the dissection of the sting the proboscis and the compound eye of the bee was a task after swammerdamm's own heart but so intricate that all his patience and skill could not save him from occasional slips he bequeathed to his successors many noble examples of the way in which life histories ought to be investigated malpighi of bologna may be called the first of the histologists for as early as the second half of the seventeenth century he unravelled the tissues of many animals and plants his work on plant tissues was so closely accompanied by the similar researches of an englishman nehemiah grew that it is not so easy to assign the priority to either malpighi was the first to demonstrate the capillaries which connect the arteries with the veins the first to investigate the glands of the human body and the sensory papillae of the skin at the request of our royal society he drew up an account of the structure and life history of the silkworm which is memorable as the earliest anatomical study of any insect malpighi also applied his microscope to the chick embryo and figured its chief stages his exposition on the formation of the heart and vessels of the chick is a marvelous example of the quick appreciation of novel structures if we suppose the micrographia of hooke to be greatly enlarged so as to become instead of the passing occupation of a man busied with a hundred other interests the main pursuit of a long and laborious life we shall get a rough notion of the microscopic revelations of his researches were desultory though not quite so desultory as hook's he must have often spent months upon an investigation which hook would have dismissed in as many weeks both travelled over the realm of nature and lacked that concentration which made the work of swammerdam so productive and so lasting lewenhoek worked with simple lenses ground and mounted by his own hands it was easy to make lenses of high magnifying power but hard to correct their optical defects to bring a sufficiently strong light to bear upon the object and to focus the lens when he wished to send out his preparations for examination by others he found it best to fix the objects in the focus and to provide each with a separate lens with such microscopes he managed to study and figure very minute objects such as blood corpuscles spermatozoa and bacteria the spermatozoa were brought under his notice by a young dutch physician named ham but it was lewenhoek's account of them and his daring theory of their physiological role which gave them such celebrity to lewenhoek we owe the first discovery of the rotifers the infusoria hydra the yeast cell the bacteria and the generation of aphids without male parents the tradition of the minute anatomist has never been lost though we shall be unable to pursue it in these pages Lionette even surpassed Swammerdam in the elaborate finish of some of his insect dissections.

early notions about the nature of fossils throughout the sixteenth century naturalists held animated debates about the shells which are found far from the sea even on the top of high hills had they ever formed part of living animals or not such a question could hardly have been seriously discussed among simple-minded people but the learned men of the sixteenth century were rarely simple-minded they had been trained to argue and argument could make it plausible that such shapes as these were generated by fermentation or by the influence of the stars so prevalent were these doctrines that it entitles any early philosopher to the respect of later generations that he should have taken shells bones and teeth to be evidences of animal life in this singular roll of honor we find the names of cecil pini pelisi schiele stenson hook and woodward in england the struggle between philosophy and common sense was long kept up dr ralph cudworth of cambridge taught that there is in nature a subordinate creative force of limited power and wisdom to whose imperfections may be attributed the errors and bungles which now and then mar the work to this subordinate creative force he gave the name of vegetable soul or plastic nature none but cambridge men it would appear felt the weight of cudworth's reasoning but several of these and especially john rae and martin lister defended his conclusions in published treatises rae came at last to believe that fossils were the remains of actual organisms but he was still much hampered by his theological views Lister, in a chapter devoted to coclites, or shell-shaped stones, pointed out that they differ from true shells in being of larger size, in occurring far from the sea, in being formed of mere stony substance, and in being often imperfect.

Some naturalists had conjectured that the living animals of the coclites still exist at great depths in the sea, but Lister evidently thought otherwise.

In the 18th century, the belief that fossils are the remains of actual animals and plants more and more prevailed, the death and sealing up of the organisms being generally attributed to Noah's flood.