70 PLANT HYBRIDIZATION BEFORE MENDEL 



Logan therefore concludes : 



"From these experiments, instituted and carried out by me with the 

 utmost accuracy, as also from several by others, it holds that this 

 pollen, evolved from the anthers, is the true masculine semen, and is 

 most clearly entirely necessary to the fecundation of the uterus and 

 seeds, which fact nevertheless all the centuries concealed up to ours." 



(P- 9.) 



The care with which the experiments were carried out, is suffi- 

 ciently attested by the remark (p. 16) : 



"After these experiments were undertaken, I scarcely permitted myself 

 to be absent from these investigations, either through the state of my 

 health or by business." 



Millington is referred to in the following words: 



"Worthy is therefore that Discoverer of this Arcana of Nature, whose 

 memory should be perpetually celebrated. He seems to have been Thomas 

 Millington, an English Knight, Savillian professor in his time before or 

 about the year 1676. For thus reported Grew in an address before the 

 Royal Society, held the 9th of November of that year. Malpighius in- 

 deed, so far as I know, nowhere thinks of any use for it (i.e., the pollen). 

 Grew himself suspected the pollen to be necessary for fecundation, but 

 not that it entered the uterus ; but twenty or more years after him, 

 Samuel Moreland, also an Englishman, affirmed that it descended to 

 the uterus itself, through the canaliculi of the style." (p. 6.) (See 

 antCi pp. 62-64.) 



10. Gleditsch's Pollination Experiments with the Palm. 



In 1751, Johann Gottlieb Gleditsch, Director of the Berlin Bo- 

 tanical Garden, published an account of an experiment in the 

 crossing of a species of palm {Chamaerops huinilis), of which 

 Sachs says in his "History of Botany" : 



"This treatise, in point of its scientific tone and learned handling of 

 the question, is the best that appeared between the time of Camerarius 

 and that of Kolreuter." (9.) 



Gleditsch's account, as reported in the "Histoire de I'Academie 

 des Sciences et Belles Lettres," 1749, begins as follows: 



"The theory of sex of plants, which," he says, "has been so long and 

 vigorously debated by modern naturalists, is at present supported upon 

 incontestable foundations, which are experience and reason. Things which 

 the greater number of physicians regarded formerly as ridiculous and 

 imaginary are proved today by the most simple experiments, and with 

 so much evidence that there no longer remains the least place for all 

 the objections capable of being formed against this system, or for all 

 the jests with which it could be loaded." (5a, p. 103.) 



It is not, he adds, that there are not more who still doubt the 



