Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/415

] 'Philosophical Transactions' of 1702 and 1703, p. 1474, he names Grew as the man who had observed that the pollen answers to the male semen, but he makes no allusion to Camerarius' experiments, the only ones which had as yet been made. He himself suggests that the young seeds may be compared to unfertilised ova, while the pollen-dust (farina) contains embryo plants, one of which must find its way into every ovule (ovum) in order to fertilise it. If so, the style must be a tube through which the embryos pass into the ova. He supposes the pollen in Fritillaria imperialis to be washed by wind and rain from the stigma through the style into the ovary, without reflecting that the movement must be an upward one in the hanging flower. If I could prove, he says, that embryos are never found in unfertilised seeds, this would be a demonstration; but I have never been so fortunate as to settle this point. He does not mention that Camerarius had shown this ten years before; he can only give as the main argument for his conjecture, that in beans the embryo lies near the orifice of the seed-coat (the micropyle), which shows that he was not aware that the two large bodies in the seed of the bean (the cotyledons) belong to the embryo, a fact which his countrymen Grew and Ray had already pointed out. It appears therefore, that Morland supplied no answer to the question how fertilisation takes place; his treatise contains nothing more than the assertion that the embryo is already contained in the pollen-grain, and that it reaches the seed through a hollow style and is there developed, an entirely erroneous and not even an original idea, for it was the off- spring of the theory of evolution which was at that time in vogue.

communications ('Histoire de l'Academic royale des sciences,' Paris, 1714, p. 210) contain a few more facts. He mentions neither Grew, Camerarius, nor even Morland, but connects his own observations of 1711 on the structure and purpose of the more important parts of the