Page:An introduction to physiological and systematical botany (1st edition).djvu/352

322 Tournefort and Pontedera supposed the pollen to be of an excrementitious nature, and thrown off as superfluous. But its being so curiously and distinctly organized in every plant, and producing a peculiar vapour on the accession of moisture, shows, beyond contradiction, that it has functions to perform after it has left the anther. The same writers conceived that the stamens might possibly secrete something to circulate from them to the young seeds; an hypothesis totally subverted by every flower with separated organs, whose stamens could circulate nothing to germens on a different branch or root; a difficulty which the judicious Tournefort perceived, and was candid enough to allow.