Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/444

424 for instance on Genista, beans, peas, radishes, Basilicum, Delphinium. It is no matter of surprise therefore that in the case of some plants, as Mercurialis and Basilicum, he arrived at the conclusion that the pollen is necessary to the production of fertile seeds, while he makes others, as the gourd, the water-melon, hemp, and spinach produce such seeds without fertilisation. His countryman Volta, a greater man, repeated his experiments and impugned the results which he had obtained from them.

Such was the character of the experiments to which Franz Joseph Schelver, Professor of Medicine in Heidelberg appealed in his 'Kritik der Lehre von dem Geschlecht der Pflanzen,' 1812. It is unnecessary to give a detailed account of this strange production of a mind misled, even though a consider- able number of German botanists as late as 1820 took its nonsense for profound wisdom. Schelver dismissed the experiments of Camerarius in four lines, and while he treated Koelreuter with contempt, he praised Spallanzani as the weightiest author on the subject. The statements of Camerarius and Koelreuter are true, he said, but they do not prove the fertilisation. He is more concerned to decide the question from the nature of vegetative life, and from this nature constructed by himself he concludes that the organs of plants are of no use at all, that they cannot even tend to be of use to one another and to propagate life together, because this one end of their action can be a living one only where all the parts are present at the same time, which of course disposes of the fertilising effect of the pollen ; accordingly he does not refer the effect of a male plant on a neighbouring female plant, which results in the formation of seeds, to pollination by the former, but it is the proximity itself which has the fertilising effect. But these are very insufficient specimens of his reasoning.

The writings of his pupil Henschel are even worse than