Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/418

398 says, that in this address he propounded the sexuality of plants most expressly and as an acknowledged fact, and that he described very graphically the way in which the anthers fertilise the pistil, into which description little that was correct probably found its way, since it required Koelreuter, Sprengel, and the botanists of quite modern times to clear up this point. Vaillant therefore can only have the credit of an eloquent description of what was then accepted. However, De Candolle goes on to say what Vaillant's discoveries were, and on the following page we read that Linnaeus confirmed these discoveries in the year 1736 in his 'Fundamenta Botanica,' and made skilful use of them in the year 1735 in laying the foundations of his sexual system. We have already in the second chapter of the first book explained the confusion of ideas which lies at the bottom of these and many similar statements, and in the same chapter have sufficiently indicated our opinion respecting Linnaeus' share in the establishment of the doctrine of sexuality. It was the character of Linnaeus' mind to attach slight value to the experimental proof of a fact, even when, like that of sexuality, it could only be proved by experiment; from the point of view of his scholastic philosophy it was more important with him to deduce the existence of this fact, in what seemed to him the philosophic way, from the idea of the plant or from reason, and in doing so to drag in a variety of analogies from the animal kingdom; hence he acknowledged the services rendered by Camerarius, but troubled himself little about his experiments which alone could decide the question, while he undertakes himself to prove the existence of sexes in plants on grounds of reason and the like in his peculiar fashion. How he did this in the 'Fundamenta' and in the 'Philosophia Botanica' has been already shown. Here we will briefly notice the often-quoted