And since they could as simply be conveyed from there into the seed-grains with the sap, as into the dust which is produced in the higher a part of the flower, I’m inclined to assume that that is the true account of the matter and that will probably be confirmed by expertise. We discover inside within the flower quite a lot of stalks disposed in a circle, and something at the highest of each, which is filled with mud and lets the dust fall on the tipper a part of that which holds the seed; this organ is in contrast by some to the genitals of the animal, and the mud to the male seed; they think also that the seed is made fruitful by the dust, and that due to this fact the embryo should be conveyed by the dust into the seed-case and there be formed into seeds. He doesn’t point out that Camerarius had proven this ten years before; he can only give as the primary 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 2 giant our bodies in the seed of the bean (the cotyledons) belong to the embryo, a reality which his countrymen Grew and Ray had already pointed out.
We learn more about it within the work, already quoted, of the philosopher Christian Wolff, ‘Vernünftige Gedanken von den Wirkungen der Natur,’ Magdeburg, 1723; it will likely be nicely to give his personal words, for they’ll serve to indicate at the same time the amount of information possessed by a cultivated and properly-learn man within the country of Camerarius and thirty years after the looks of his treatise on the sexuality of plants. A feminine hamster might mate, give delivery to and wean a litter whereas a cavy (guinea pig) feminine mated at the identical time goes only half method via her time period of gestation. He makes the petals take up nourishment from the flower-stalks, which they further digest and provide to the growing fruit, whereas the unappropriated components of the sap move through the filaments into the anthers and gather in the loculaments, to be afterwards discharged as excreta. It was the character of Linnaeus’ thoughts to attach slight worth to the experimental proof of a truth, even when, like that of sexuality, it might only be proved by experiment; from the standpoint of his scholastic philosophy it was more necessary with him to deduce the existence of this truth, in what seemed to him the philosophic means, from the concept of the plant or from motive, and in doing so to drag in a variety of analogies from the animal kingdom; therefore he acknowledged the companies rendered by Camerarius, but troubled himself little about his experiments which alone could resolve the question, while he undertakes himself to prove the existence of sexes in plants on grounds of cause and the like in his peculiar trend.
We conclude therefore that neither Linnaeus nor his disciples in the interval that elapsed between the labours of Camerarius and Koelreuter contributed a single new or legitimate proof to the institution of the actual fact, that there’s a sexual difference in plants and that hybrids are formed between totally different species; and if many later botanists talked of the great services rendered by Linnaeus to the sexual principle, and even regarded him as its most eminent founder, this arose partly from the truth that they were unable to tell apart between his scholastic deductions and scientific proof, and partly from that confusion of the thought of sexuality with a classification of plants based on the sexual organs, to which now we have earlier than referred to as consideration. Enough has been produced to show that Morland and Geoffrey contributed nothing both to the institution of the fact of sexuality in plants, or to the choice of the query how the pollen effects fertilisation within the ovule. We come now to the names of males Leibnitz, Burckhard, Vaillant, Linnaeus who are usually purported to have aided in establishing the sexual concept, however who may be proved to have contributed nothing whatever to the scientific demonstration of that doctrine.
Suppose now that we have the whole meadow in view from some level of vantage. But now comes the main query, whence come the embryos into the sap; since they have not an exterior determine solely however an inside structure additionally, it isn’t plain how they are often formed both by the mere internal movement of the sap, or by separation of sure elements. If that’s the case, the model have to be a tube via which the embryos pass into the ova. The reply to those questions could solely be obtained by experiment, that’s by artificial hybridisation; for till hybrid types had really been produced on this manner, it have to be quite unsafe to assume that certain wild plants owed their origin to cross-fertilisation. More cheap doubts had been advised by a German botanist, Moller, who noticed that female plants of spinach and hemp produced seeds even after the removal of the male plants, and appealed to the apparently asexual propagation of Cryptogams; these objections have been answered by Kästner of Göttingen, who pointed to the fact that dioecious plants, the willow for example, typically bear hermaphrodite flowers. If we examine Koelreuter’s writings, which are full of matter in a small compass, with all that was produced after Camerarius, we are astonished not solely at the abundance of recent ideas, however still more at their wonderful clearness and perspicuity, and the sureness of the inspiration laid for them in remark and experiment.