The emerging field of plant physiology - continued...

Many of therein discussed issues were stimulated by general physiology, which at the time was thought to clearly facilitate the study of the nature and life of plants. This general physiology of natural bodies, foremost a field of medicine, provided for the concurrent principles and fundamentals for the physiological investigation of the vegetable kingdom. Again it was the chemical analysis which in the eyes of the botanists supplied the means for identification of objects as it helped to aquire a much finer differentiation. Chemistry and physics not only in the Humboldtian, and later in Liebig's aggressive opinion were able to trustworthyly disseminate the brightest light on the physics, and the life, of all natural bodies.

Endowed with basic equipment, such as microscopes, lenses, scissors, anatomical knives and needles, these botanists ventured into an anatomical research studying the structural details and morphological designs of plants. By doing so they gave a rich account of how closely comparative and morphological as well as developmental studies had already been associated with contemporary physiological enquiries at the beginning of the 19th century. This, although usually presented otherwise, had not been too different in the late 1830s and early 1840s, as the works collected in the Jahresberichte clearly demonstrate. Many of these works primarely dealt with plant anatomical and morphological research which tried to gain insights into the principles of the living processes of plants.

And it was, next to circumstantial taxonomical works in the realm of the botanical gardens, also the life and chemistry of plants which already in earlier times, around the turn of the century, was of highest importance to the doings of botanists. This is nicely illustrated again by Link who, after taking up the directorate of the Royal botanical garden in Schöneberg, set aside a laboratory within the greenhouses to further pursue, as he remarked in a report to the authorities in 1816, plant chemistry, or as he himself termed it, vegetabilische Chemie.