Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/399

] among the botanists of Germany and the Netherlands in the 16th century. 'The idea of a male sex in such plants as Abrotanum, Asphodelus, Filix, Polygonum mas et femina, was founded only on difference of habit, and not on the parts which are essential to it. But it should be observed that it is the less learned among the older botanists, Fuchs, Mattioli, Tabernaemontan, who make most frequent use of this mode of designating plants; the more learned, as Conrad Gesner, de l'Ecluse, J. Bauhin employ it only in the case of a plant already known. De l'Ecluse it is true in describing the plants which he found often notes the form, colour, and even the number of the stamens; in Carica Papaya he calls the individual with stamens the male, and the one with carpels the female, since he holds them to belong to different sexes, though of the same species; but he is satisfied with saying, that it is affirmed that the two are so far connected, that the female produces no fruit if the male is separated from it by any great distance ('Curae posteriores,' 42).

The case of the botanists above-mentioned is simply one of ignorance; in the botanical philosopher Cesalpino on the contrary we see a consequence of the Aristotelian system, which leads him distinctly to reject the hypothesis of separate sexual organs in plants as opposed to their nature. It is difficult to understand how De Candolle, at page 48 of his 'Physiologic vegetale,' can say that Cesalpino recognised the presence of sexes in plants. His conception of vegetable seed-grains as analogous to the male seed in animals must have made it impossible for him to understand sexuality in plants. So too his notion that the seed is derived from the pith as the principle of life in plants, in connection with which he says at page 11 of the first of his sixteen books; 'Non fuit autem necesse in plantis genituram aliquam distinctam a materia secerni, ut in animalibus, quae mari et femina distinguuntur.' He regarded the parts of the flower which surround the ovary, or are separate from it, together with