Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/401

] traditional knowledge on the subject to some kind of theory. The foetus, he says, is a part of the nature of plants, which they produce out of themselves, and is thus distinguished from the shoot which grows from the plant, as a part from the whole, but the other as a whole from a whole. He quotes Pliny almost word for word where he says, that observers of nature maintain that all plants are of both sexes, but in some the sexes are conjoined, in others they are separate ; in many plants the male and female are united, and these have the power of propagation in themselves, like many androgynous animals; and he explains this, more explicitly than Aristotle, from defect of locomotion in plants. This is the case, he says, with the majority of plants. In some, as the palm, the male and female are separated, and the female without the male produces no fruit, and where the dust from the male does not reach the female plant by natural means, man can assist. Zaluziansky like other writers is anxious that plants of different sexes should not be taken for different species. He refers also to the popular distinction of many plants into male and female according to certain external peculiarities.

Jung again must certainly have known the facts and views that were current in his time; but there is nothing in his botanical writings to show that he entertained the idea of a real sexuality in plants, of the necessity of the co-operation of two sexes in the work of propagation. It might almost be believed that the most learned and serious men, such as Cesalpino and Jung, were just those, who regarded the hypothesis of sexuality in plants as an absurdity, and shrunk from its consideration. This impression is conveyed too by Malpighi's 'Anatomic des Plantes.' It was Malpighi who gave the first careful account of the development of the seed, and studied the earlier stages in the growth of the embryo in the embryosac; and yet even he says nothing of the co-operation of the dust contained in the anthers in the formation of the embryo,