398 Scientific Intelligence, — Botany. 



elements of the secondary foi-mations. — Bulletin. Univers., April 

 1828. ,* 



BOTANY. 



16. Inquiries respecting' tlie Pollen of Vegetables. — On the 

 21st July 1828, there was read, to the Academie des Sciences, 

 a letter from M. Raspail, respecting the spermatic animalcules 

 which M. Adolphe Brongniart thought he had discovered in the 

 pollen of vegetables, and whose existence M. Raspail persists in 

 denying. The author, whose object was particularly to reply 

 to M. Brongniart's last memoir, mentioned, that this young ob- 

 server having presented the pollen of the Malvacea, as that in 

 which he had met with the largest animalcules; it was toward this 

 same pollen that his own inquiries were naturally directed. The 

 result of these inquiries was the conviction, that the alleged ani- 

 malcules were nothing but minute drops of substances soluble 

 in alcohol. M. Adolphe Brongniart admits, in his new work, 

 that resinous drops are emitted, in great numbers, during the 

 explosion of the pollen, a circumstance of which he took no no- 

 tice in his first memoir. Faithful to his first opinion, he how- 

 ever asserts, that these drops have nothing to do with his ani- 

 malcules ; " but, in order to prove it to us,'' says M. Raspail, 

 " in place of making the experiment upon the pollen of the 

 malvaceae, he has recourse, all of a sudden, to the pollen of 

 other families, and finds, that, in these, the animalcules do not 

 dissolve in alcohol, but only lose their motion in it.*" As resin, 

 wax, and essential oil, do not, by any means, exist in the same 

 proportions in the pollen of different plants, as M. Raspail has 

 proved in a former memoir, it is not surprising that M. Brong- 

 niart should not find, in the pollen of the gramineas, so great an 

 abundance of resinous drops as in the pollen of the malvaceae ; 

 or that he should see round bodies in it, which did not dissolve 

 in alcohol. But it is obviously on the malvaceae that the expe- 

 riments in question ought to have been repeated. M. Brongniart's 

 mode of operating, also, is so inaccurate, that M. Raspail is 

 compelled to doubt whether he employed his process in the 

 mariner which he points out. He says he poured alcohol on the 

 animalcules in motion ; in other words, and by consequence, 

 into the drop of water in which they were moving, and yet did 



