The German Genius

person to observe cells was Robert Hooke (1635–1703), curator of experiments at the Royal Society in London, whose Micrographia appeared in 1665. In later centuries, many others, benefiting from the ever-improving microscopes, observed “globules” or “vesicles,” of different sizes and shapes, in both animal and vegetable tissue. We know from a letter that the Dutchman Anton van Leeuwenhoek of Delft wrote to Robert Hooke in March 1682 that he had already observed a darker body inside cells that would come to be called the nucleus. 26 By the end of the eighteenth century, most botanists accepted that plants were composed largely of cells, with Kaspar Friedrich Wolff (1733–94) one of the first to advocate that the fundamental subunit of all tissues—animal and vegetable—was a vesicle or globule and which, like others before him, he sometimes called a cell. However, no one had ever suggested—in print anyway—that plant cells and animal cells were homologous, and no one knew how cells divided or how new cells were formed. In 1805 Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) put forward the view that all living forms, plants as well as animals, were composed of “infusoria,” these being simple organisms like bacteria or protozoa, in other words, the simplest and most primitive forms of life then known. 27
    But the first man to advance thought to its modern understanding was Jan Evangelista Purkyne. Strictly speaking, Purkyne was Czech, not German. However, since their defeat in the battle of the White Mountain in 1620, the inhabitants of Bohemia had been “inundated” by waves of Germanization, with Czech speakers gradually reduced to menial positions. The University of Prague, founded by Charles IV in 1348 and originally open to Czechs, Germans, and Poles, was, by the time Mozart made his celebrated journey to that city in 1787, a German-speaking institution. 28
    Purkyne (or Purkinje, as the name is spelled in the German literature) was educated as a choirboy in Mikulov (Nikolsburg) in Moravia. He first obtained employment as a teacher but left his order and took a medical and philosophy degree at the University of Prague, graduating in 1819. Later he accepted a chair of physiology and pathology at the University of Breslau (Wroclaw), then politically and culturally a German city. The University of Breslau had been founded in 1811, a year after the University of Berlin, and there was intense rivalry between the two institutions. As part of this rivalry, Purkyne was given the first institute of physiology in Germany.
    From his earliest years, he entertained the notion that there were fundamental parallels between animal and plant cells. The 1830s saw more progress, with several experiments clarifying the structure of such animal tissues as skin and bone, these papers referring to “granules,” “ Körnchen ,” “ Körperchen ,” and “ Zellen ” the idea that there was “homology” between some plant cells and some animal cells, says Henry Harris, was gaining strength. 29 Then there was the fact that Franz Bauer, an Austrian who was a superb botanical artist, highlighted the nucleus in his drawings. These had been made as early as 1802 but were not released until the 1830s, when he made it plain he regarded the nucleus as a regular feature of cells. 30 The nucleus was actually so named by Robert Brown, custodian of the botanical collections at the British Museum (and the man who identified “Brownian motion”), but his suggestion was made the most of in Germany, the word being used as an alternative to “ Kern ” (kernel). The nucleolus, within the nucleus, was first observed by Rudolph Wagner in 1835, though to begin with he called it a “Fleck,” and then “the germinative spot” (“ macula germinative ”). 31
    Purkyne’s advances were not due simply to improved microscopy; he used the new dyes to perfect new staining techniques. He and his colleagues alluded several times in print to the similarity between animal and plant cells and in a lecture he gave to the Society of German Naturalists and Doctors, meeting in Prague in September 1837, Purkyne made a tour d’horizon of the animal tissues in which “ Körnchen ”—with central nuclei—had been observed: salivary glands, pancreas, the wax glands of the ear, kidneys, and testes. “The animal organism can be almost entirely reduced to three principal elementary components: fluids, cells and