37 Introduction. [BOOK in.
logic, and the sexuality of plants was once more openly im- pugned in the face of Koelreuter's investigations. This state of things continued till some time after 1820, but then it began to improve once more. L. C. Treviranus examined and refuted the errors of Schelwer and Henschel in 1822 ; in Eng- land Herbert conducted new and very valuable investigations into the question of hybridisation ; and it was in this period that Carl Friedrich G�rtner studied and experimented on normal fertilisation and the production of hybrids during more than twenty years ; his conclusions, published in exhaustive works in 1844 and in 1849, finally settled the more important questions connected with the sexual theory about the same time that Hofmeister established the microscopic embryology of Phanerogams on a firm foundation.
Other parts also of vegetable physiology had been consider- ably advanced before 1840 ; Theodore de Saussure observed in 1822 the production of heat in flowers and its dependence on respiration ten years later Goeppert proved the rise of tem- perature in germinating and vegetating organs. Dutrochet stimulated enquiry by his researches in various branches of the science between 1820 and 1840 ; he was the first to apply the phenomena of diosmosis to the explanation of the movement of sap in plants with a lasting influence on the further progress of physiology. Chemical investigations were less fruitful in results, though they served to collect a considerable material of single facts, which could afterwards be turned to theoretical account.
The close of this period, which began with unprofitable doubts, but in which much was set in a train for further development after 1840, is marked by the publication of some important compilations, in which all that had as yet been done in vegetable physiology was presented in a con- nected form. In addition to Dutrochet's collected works (1837) three comprehensive compendia of vegetable physiology made
their appearance, one by De Candolle, which was translated