books could now disseminate the new teaching through
wider circles, and with these works may be classed von Mohl's
treatise already mentioned on the vegetable cell, since it came
much into use in a later and special edition, and was made by
many teachers of botany the foundation and guide in their
lectures. It was now become the fashion to compose not
general text-books of botany, but compendia of anatomy and
physiology, and thus morphology and systematic botany were
neglected, as anatomy and physiology had been in the period
immediately preceding Schleiden's time. Whoever therefore
wished to consult a complete manual of general botany was
for some time obliged to be content with Schleiden's 'Grundzüge'; and this had a great deal to do with keeping alive
his erroneous doctrines on cells and fertilisation among
general readers, while the professed botanists had long given
in their adherence to more modern and more correct views.
It is a misfortune in our science to be singularly poor in good
text-books, which might have given a general account from
time to time of the existing condition of research ; this is one
of the reasons why for some time past even official representatives of botanical science often differ so much from one
another in their fundamental views on method, and on the
question of how much has been actually established and how
much still remains doubtful in the main divisions of the
subject, that a mutual understanding seems often impossible.
That a better state of things in this respect prevails in zoology,
physics, and chemistry, is certainly not a little due to the many
good compendia and text-books, which endeavour to give some account of the progress of those sciences from year to year.
However, during the period from 1850 to 1870 Schacht and Unger attempted to make the results of modern phytotomic investigation accessible to general readers by means of text-books. Such was the nature of Schacht’s[1] work,
- ↑ Hermann Schacht was born at Ochsenwerder in 1824, and died in 1864 in Bonn, where he had been Professor of Botany since 1859.
