Plant Anatomy

PLANT ANATOMY, a branch of botany that studies the microscopic structure of plants. Plant anatomy almost entirely corresponds to animal histology and could only have originated after the invention of the microscope, first applied to plant research by R. Hooke (1667). The founders of plant anatomy (at the end of the 17th century) are considered to be the Italian Malpighi and the Englishman Grew, but plant anatomy was established on a firm scientific basis only in the middle of the 19th century, thanks to the work of Moll, Naegeli, Schleiden, when the concept of the cell as the elementary unit of structure of plants and animals was finally established. In modern plant anatomy, there are two main directions: 1) morphological, associated with the name of its most prominent representative A. de Bary, which considers the internal structure of a plant from the point of view of form and origin of the constituent cells and their groupings, regardless of their functions, and 2) physiological, originating from Sachs and Schwendener and skillfully developed by Haberland, which seeks to establish the functional connection between the internal structure of plant organs and their life processes.