How completely insects effect the pollination of flowers he showed by a comparative trial, in which he applied pollen himself to 3 hundred and ten flowers with a brush, whereas he left the identical quantity to the operation of insects; the variety of seeds formed in the latter case was little or no lower than in the previous, although the insects needed to contend with unfavourable weather. Koelreuter’s works quite the opposite seem to belong to our personal time; they include the very best data which we possess on the query of sexuality, and haven’t become antiquated after the lapse of greater than 100 years. As Camerarius first proved that plants possess sexuality, and Koelreuter showed that plants of various species can unite sexually and produce fruitful hybrids, so now Sprengel showed that a sure type of hybridisation is widespread within the vegetable kingdom, particularly the crossing of various flowers or different people of the identical species. On the identical morning that DiNardo, going through this accusation, met with Pope Francis, the Vatican introduced that Francis would accept the resignation of Bransfield, the 75-12 months-previous leader of the Wheeling-Charleston, W. Va., diocese.
We study more about it within the work, already quoted, of the philosopher Christian Wolff, ‘Vernünftige Gedanken von den Wirkungen der Natur,’ Magdeburg, 1723; it is going to be nicely to present his personal words, for they are going to serve to show at the identical time the quantity of information possessed by a cultivated and properly-learn man within the nation of Camerarius and thirty years after the appearance of his treatise on the sexuality of plants. His real knowledge of hybrids is partly drawn from the statements of Linnaeus, with which now we have already made acquaintance; he even describes a hybrid between a goat and a cow, and other similar ones, and he is indignant with Koelreuter for fixing such narrow limits to the prevalence of hybrids; thus the primary person who produced hybrids systematically within the vegetable kingdom must undergo be scolded for refusing to accept the imaginary hybrids of his contemporaries. We have already given an account within the chapters on Systematic Botany of the providers rendered by Gärtner to the information of the seed in its immature and in its mature situation; as regards the means of fertilisation he adopted in the principle Koelreuter’s view, that it is the result of the union of a male and female fluid, from which the germ-corpuscle within the ovule is developed by a type of crystallisation.
Koelreuter’s doctrines however didn’t always fall on un- fruitful soil ; two botanists no less than had been found in Germany who adopted them, Joseph Gärtner the writer of the famous Carpology and father of Carl Friedrich Gärtner who at a later time spent twenty-5 years in experimenting on fertilisation and hybridisation, and Konrad Sprengel who took up Koelreuter’s discovery of the providers rendered by insects and arrived at some new and really exceptional outcomes. He seen that the lobes when touched close, however quickly open once more; but when pollen is placed upon them, they stay closed till fertilisation is secured. The first hybrid which he obtained by placing the pollen of Nicotiana paniculata on the stigmas of N. rustica, produced pollen that was impotent; but he soon after obtained hybrids from the two species which produced seeds able to germination, and in 1763 he described a substantial number of hybrids within the genera Nicotiana, Kedmia, Dianthus, Matthiola, Hyoscyamus, and others.
We find inside within the flower quite a few stalks disposed in a circle, and one thing at the top of every, which is filled with mud and lets the mud fall on the tipper part of that which holds the seed; this organ is compared by some to the genitals of the animal, and the mud to the male seed; they suppose additionally that the seed is made fruitful by the dust, and that due to this fact the embryo have to be conveyed by the mud into the seed-case and there be formed into seeds. He also made the first careful examine of the completely different preparations inside the flower in their connection with the sexual relation, found the purpose of the nectar and the co-operation of insects in pollination, and proposed that view of the sexual act, which with some appreciable modification we should nonetheless in the primary consider to be the true one, particularly, that it’s a mingling collectively of two different substances. The primary-named author in his work ‘Das Neueste aus dem Reich der Pflanzen,’ 1764, relying principally on microscopic commentary of the contents of pollen-grains, supported the view that the granules in them answer to spermatozoids in animals, and that they discover their way into the ovule and are there developed into embryos.