Introduction

The word cell traces back to the Latin cella, meaning a small chamber or compartment. It entered biology when Robert Hooke used the term around 1662 to describe the tiny box-like compartments he saw in cork tissue under his microscope. By the time it is studied today, the word has been in continuous use for roughly three centuries, making 'cell' one of the oldest surviving pieces of biological vocabulary, older than almost everything else this chapter goes on to describe about the structures it names.