-
He described the microscopic
units that made up the structure of a
slice of cork and coined the term ‘‘cells’’ or
‘‘pores’’ to refer to these units. Cella is a
Latin word meaning ‘a small room’ and
Latin-speaking people applied the word
Cellulae to the six-sided cells of the honeycomb -
Antoni van leuwen saw motile particles and in 1676 he concluded they were living organisms -
Italian naturalist Lazzaro
Spallanzani . He and other
researchers showed that an organism
derives from another organism(s) and that
a gap exists between inanimate matter and
life. and this disproved any theory of spontaneous generation. -
The Scottish botanist Robert Brown (1773–
1858) was the first to recognize the nucleus
(a term that he introduced) as an essential
constituent of living cells -
The botanist Matthias Jakob
Schleiden suggested that
every structural element of plants is composed of cells or their products. The following year, a similar conclusion was
elaborated for animals -
After Schleiden and Swann’s formulation of
cell theory, the basic constituents of the cell
were considered to be a wall or a simple
membrane -
The introduction of the oil immersion lens, the development of
the microtome technique and the use of
new fixing methods and dyes greatly
improved microscopy -
The most important breakthrough in
neurocytology and neuroanatomy came
when Golgi developed the ‘black reaction
This reaction provided,for the first time, a full view of a single
nerve cell and its processes, which could
be followed and analysed even when they
were at a great distance from the cell body. -
Walther
Flemming, who also introduced
the term ‘‘mitosis’’ in 1882 and gave
a superb description of its various
processes. Flemming observed the longitudinal
splitting of salamander chromosomes -
at the
beginning of 1887, by another Swiss scientist, the psychiatrist August Forel and, in 1891, Waldeyer introduced
the term ‘‘neurons’’ to indicate independent nerve cells Thereafter, cell theory as
applied to the nervous system became
known as the ‘neuron theory’.