spacer
/ 8

The emerging field of plant physiology - continued...

III.
Taking Schleiden's view verbatim one could assume that Link did not take the various spheres of the diverse natural sciences into an approriate account. This, in quintessence, had been one of the most essential accusations of the younger generation of botanists who only saw the older botanists chasing the ominous Lebenskraft - or vital principle - and by doing so, as the chemist Justus Liebig (1803-1873) in his Organic chemistry in its application to agriculture and physiology (1840) claimed, leaving both their senses and skills far behind.

This, however, has never actually been the case. The physiology of plants has already had a long history of its own prior to the 1840s. Already in the 1790s Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was pursuing experimental research with plants that was inspired by the works of especially French chemists of the time. Much of this research was collected in the publication of his Aphorismen aus der chemischen Physiologie der Pflanzen (1793) which Humboldt dedicated to Carl Ludwig Willdenow (1765-1812), at the time director of the Royal botanical garden in Schöneberg. His introduction about the objects of plant physiology to the work of the Dutch physician Jan Ingen-Housz, An essay on the food of plants and renovation of the soil, published in German in 1798, was of highest influence to later generations of botanists, physiologists and agriculturalists who held the work in high esteem. According to Humboldt he had implemented some 4000 experiments between 1792 and 1798. Many of these dealt with various plant species and focussed on plant physiology within a chemically inspired research and observation, something he himself had termed "vital chemistry" or "chemical physiology of plants."

Only little later, Link - in his book Grundlehren der Anatomie und Physiologie der Pflanzen (1806, printed 1807) - brought many ideas forward which were, strictly speaking, of physiological nature. With this, he was in accordance with many renown botanists of his generation, such as Ludolf Christian Treviranus (1779-1864) and his books Vom inwendigen Bau der Gewächse (1806) and Beiträge zur Pflanzenphysiologie (1811), not to mention the contemporary works of Georg Dietrich von Kieser (1779-1862) and Paul Moldenhauer (1766-1827).

ISSN 1866-4784: reference - xlink