Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/74

 system of plants which he founded on the fructification, beginning with the least perfect; no one who knows the botanical writers of the 17th and 18th centuries will be surprised to find that Cesalpino admits the doctrine of 'generatio spontanea' in the case of the lower plants, and in a somewhat crude form; this came from the teaching of Aristotle, and even a hundred years later Mariotte endeavoured to set up a plausible defence of spontaneous generation on physical grounds even in highly developed plants.

'Some plants,' says Cesalpino, 'have no seed; these are the most imperfect, and spring from decaying substances; they have only therefore to feed themselves and grow, and are unable to produce their like; they are a sort of intermediate existences between plants and inanimate nature. In this respect Fungi resemble Zoophytes, which are intermediate between plants and animals, and of the same nature are the Lemnae, Lichenes, and many plants which grow in the sea.'

Some on the other hand produce seed, which they form after their peculiar nature in an imperfect condition, as the mule among animals; these are of the same nature as mere monstrosities or diseased growths of other plants, and many occur in the class of grain and bear empty ears. Cesalpino is evidently speaking of the Ustilagineae, but he includes also the Orobancheae and Hypocystis, which instead of seed contain only a powder; and he adds that some of the more perfect plants are sterile, but they do not belong to this division, because the peculiarity is confined in their case to individuals.

Some plants bear a substance, a kind of wool, on the leaves, which to some extent answers to seed, because it serves to propagate the plant; such plants have neither stem, flower, nor true seed, and the Ferns are of this kind. We should notice this conclusion from Cesalpino's morphology, that plants without true seeds have also no stem; the view that ferns have no stems continued to be held by later botanists, though the original reason for it was gradually lost; and those who in the