424 History of the Sexual Theory. [BOOK in. 



for instance on Genista, beans, peas, radishes, Basilicum, Del- 

 phinium. 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 ex- 

 periments 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 Came- 

 rarius 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 con- 

 structed 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 1 are even worse than 



1 August Henschel was a practising physician and a University teacher in 

 Breslau. 



