But there were certain precursors of the famous Swedish naturalist, some of them antedating him by more than a century, whose work must not be altogether ignored--such men as Konrad Gesner (1516-1565), Andreas Caesalpinus (1579-1603), Francisco Redi (1618-1676), Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608-1679), John Ray (1628-1705), Robert Hooke (1635-1703), John Swammerdam (1637-1680), Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694), Nehemiah Grew (1628-1711), Joseph Tournefort (1656-1708), Rudolf Jacob Camerarius (1665-1721), and Stephen Hales (1677-1761).

The last named of these was, to be sure, a contemporary of Linnaeus himself, but Gesner and Caesalpinus belong, it will be observed, to so remote an epoch as that of Copernicus.
Reference has been made in an earlier chapter to the microscopic investigations of Marcello Malpighi, who, as there related, was the first observer who actually saw blood corpuscles pass through the capillaries.

Another feat of this earliest of great microscopists was to dissect muscular tissue, and thus become the father of microscopic anatomy.

But Malpighi did not confine his observations to animal tissues.

He dissected plants as well, and he is almost as fully entitled to be called the father of vegetable anatomy, though here his honors are shared by the Englishman Grew.