MALOUET, PIERRE VICTOR,, Baron (1740-1814), French publicist and politician, was born at Riom (Puy-de-Dôme) on the 11th of February 1740, the son of a lawyer. He entered the civil service and was employed successively at the French embassy in Lisbon, in the administrative department of the duc de Broglie’s army, as commissary in San Domingo from 1767-1774, and, after his return to France, as commissary-general of the marine. In 1776 he was entrusted to carry out plans of colonization in French Guiana, but was superseded in 1779. On his return to France he was well received at court, and the execution of his plans in Guiana was assured. He became intendant of the port of Toulon, and in 1789 was returned to the states-general, where he soon became well known as a defender of the monarchical principle. He emigrated to England in September, 1792, but shortly afterwards sought in vain permission to return to assist in the defence of Louis XVI. His name was erased from the list of emigrants in 1801 by Napoleon, who restored him to his position in the service and sent him to Antwerp as commissioner-general and maritime prefect to superintend the erection of defence works, and the creation of a fleet. He entered the council of state in 1810, but, having offended the emperor by his plainness of speech, he was disgraced in 1812. At the Restoration, Louis XVIII. made him minister of marine; and he died on the 7th of September 1814.
The most important documents for his domestic and colonial policy are a Collection de ses opinions à l’Assemblée Nationale (3 vols., 1791-1792); and Collection de mémoires et correspondances officielles sur l’administration des colonies et notamment sur la Guiane française et hollandaise (5 vols., 1802).
MALPIGHI, MARCELLO (1628-1694), Italian physiologist, was born at Crevalcuore near Bologna, on the 10th of March 1628. At the age of seventeen he began the study of philosophy; it appears that he was also in the habit of amusing himself with the microscope. In 1649 he started to study medicine; after four years at Bologna he graduated there as doctor. He at once applied to be admitted to lecture in the university, but it was not till after three years (1656) that his request was granted. A few months later he was appointed to the chair of theoretical medicine at Pisa, where he enjoyed the friendship and countenance of G. A. Borelli. At the end of four years he left Pisa, on the ground of ill-health, and returned to Bologna. A call to be professor primarius at Messina (procured for him through Borelli, who had in the meantime become professor there) induced him to leave Bologna in 1662. His engagement at Messina was for a term of four years, at an annual stipend of 1000 scudi. An attempt was made to retain him at Messina beyond that period, but his services were secured for his native university, and he spent the next twenty-five years there. In 1691, being then in his sixty-fourth year, and in failing health, he removed to Rome to become private physician to Pope Innocent XII., and he died there of apoplexy three years later, on the 30th of November 1694. Shortly before his death, he drew up a long account of his academical and scientific labours, correspondence and controversies, and committed it to the charge of the Royal Society of London, a body with which he had been in intimate relations for more than twenty years. The autobiography, along with some other posthumous writings, was published in London in 1696, at the cost of the Society. The personal details left by Malpighi are few and dry. His narrative is mainly occupied with a summary of his scientific contributions and an account of his relations to contemporary anatomists, and is entirely without graces of style or elements of ordinary human interest.
Malpighi was one of the first to apply the microscope to the study of animal and vegetable structure; and his discoveries were so important that he may be considered to be the founder of microscopic anatomy. It was his practice to open animals alive, and some of his most striking discoveries were made in those circumstances. Although Harvey had correctly inferred the existence of the capillary circulation, he had never seen it; it was reserved for Malpighi in 1661 (four years after Harvey’s death) to see for the first time the marvellous spectacle of the blood coursing through a network of small tubes on the surface of the lung and of the distended urinary bladder of the frog. We are enabled to measure the difficulties of microscopic observation at the time by the fact that it took Malpighi four years longer to reach a clear understanding of the corpuscles in the frog’s blood, although they are the parts of the blood by which its movement in the capillaries is made visible. His discovery of the capillary circulation was given to the world in the form of two letters De Pulmonibus, addressed to Borelli, published at Bologna in 1661 and reprinted at Leiden and other places in the years following; these letters contained also the first account of the vesicular structure of the human lung, and they made a theory of respiration for the first time possible. The achievement that comes next both in importance and in order of time was a demonstration of the plan of structure of secreting glands; against the current opinion (revived by F. Ruysch forty years later) that the glandular structure was essentially that of a closed vascular coil from which the secretion exuded, he maintained that the secretion was formed in terminal acini standing in open communication with the ducts. The name of Malpighi is still associated with his discovery of the soft or mucous character of the lower stratum of the epidermis, of the vascular coils in the cortex of the kidney, and of the follicular bodies in the spleen. He was the first to attempt the finer anatomy of the brain, and his descriptions of the distribution of grey matter and of the fibre-tracts in the cord, with their extensions to the cerebrum and cerebellum, are distinguished by accuracy; but his microscopic study of the grey matter conducted him to the opinion that it was of glandular structure and that it secreted the “vital spirits.” At an early period he applied himself to vegetable histology as an introduction to the more difficult study of the animal tissues, and he was acquainted with the spiral vessels of plants in 1662. It was not till 1671 that he wrote his Anatome plantarum and sent it to the Royal Society, who published it in the following year. An English work under a similar title (Anatomy of Vegetables) had been published in London a few months earlier, by Nehemiah Grew; so that Malpighi’s priority as a vegetable histologist is not so incontestable as it is in animal histology. The Anatome plantarum contained an appendix, Observations de ovo incubato, which gave an account (with good plates) of the development of the chick (especially of the later stages) in many points more complete than that of Harvey, although the observations were needlessly lessened in value by being joined to the metaphysical notion of “praedelineation” in the undeveloped ovum.
He also wrote Epistolae anatomicae Marc. Malpighii et Car. Fracassati (Amsterdam, 1662) (on the tongue, brain, skin, omentum, &c.); De viscerum structura: exercitatio anatomica (London, 1669); De structura glandularum conglobatarum (London, 1689); Opera posthuma, et vita a seipso scripta (London, 1697; another edition, with preface and additions, was published at Amsterdam in 1700.). An edition containing all his works except the last two was published in London in 1687, in 2 vols. folio, with portrait and plates.
MALPLAQUET, a village of France in the department of the Nord, close to the Belgian frontier and about 10 miles S. by E. of Mons, famous as the scene of the battle, September 1709, between the Allies under the duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugène and the French commanded by Marshal Villars, in which the former were victorious. The country to the west and south of Mons is enclosed by a semicircular wall of woods and broken ground, through which there are only two important gaps—that of Jemappes (famous in 1792) to the west, and that of Aulnois, in which stands the village of Malplaquet, to the south. In the latter gap and the woods on either side Villars took up his position facing north-eastwards, on August 29/September 9. The forces in presence, over 90,000 on each side, were exceptionally large, and the French army in particular represented the spirit of its nation to a degree unusual in the armies of that time. Villars was the best general in the service of Louis XIV. and the veteran Marshal Boufflers, though senior to him, had volunteered to serve as his second in command. Marlborough and Eugène lay with their army between Mons and the French camps, which were almost within cannon shot. Marlborough’s own wish was for an immediate battle, but he was opposed by the Dutch deputies at his headquarters, and even by Eugène, so that it was only on August 31/September 11 that the attack actually took place. Villars had made full use of his respite. The French right stood at the fringe of the wood of Lanière, the left was strongly posted in the midst of the wood of Taisnière, and across the two and a half miles of open ground between the woods the position was entrenched with several successive lines of works. The troops were almost equally distributed along the whole line as usual, and the cavalry was massed in rear of the infantry. In the Allied army the mounted troops were also kept back, but for the most part distributed to the various infantry commands.
The intention of Marlborough and Eugène, when on the morning of the battle they examined this formidable position, was to deliver the main attack upon the French left wing, combining the assaults of several columns on its front and flanks. In this quarter the French not only held the interior of the wood but also were thrown forward so as to occupy the edges of its north-eastern salient, and upon the two faces of this salient Count Lottum (1650-1719) with the Prussians, and Count von der Schulenburg (1661-1747) with the Austrian infantry were to deliver a double attack, while farther to the Allied right a column under the English General Withers was detached to make a wide turning movement through the woods. Marlborough took command on the right, Eugène on the left. The centre, which was intended only to observe the enemy until the decision had been forced at the wood of Taisnière, consisted of Lord Orkney’s British corps and the prince of Orange’s Dutch contingent. These extended across the Trouée d’Aulnois as soon as the combined attack of Lottum and Schulenburg opened. The general advance was covered by a heavy cannonade, and the salient of the Taisnière wood was duly attacked on its two faces by the Prussians and Austrians about 9 a.m. They encountered a sterner resistance than in any of the battles and combats of the past seven campaigns, for on this field the defenders were fighting, not as hitherto for the interests of their king, but to defend their country, and the regiments of Picardie and Champagne which held the salient were the oldest and most famous of the French line. Lottum attacked the works on the eastern edge, again and again without success, until three British battalions had to be sent to reinforce him, and Marlborough placed himself with a corps of cavalry in close support. At last the entrenchments were stormed. Schulenburg, with the Austrians, had by this time fought his way through the woods and undergrowth, and the united force pressed back the French farther and farther into the wood. Still, so stubborn was the defence and so dense the wood that the impetus of the assault died away and the troops on both sides broke up into small disconnected bodies, fighting too fiercely to be amenable to superior control.