CHAPTER 1 

 HISTORICAL SKETCH 



In tracing the history of a branch of natural science it is customary 

 to go back to the days of Aristotle. The greater part of his technical 

 writings is unfortunately lost to us, but it seems fairly certain that 

 he did not recognize the presence of sex in plants. He believed 

 instead that the male and female principles were so blended that 

 they generated of their own accord and the offspring arose from the 

 superfluous food in the plant. 



Aristotle bequeathed his library and collections to his favorite 

 pupil Theophrastus. In his "Enquiry into Plants," written in the 

 third century B.C., the latter referred to the pollination of the date 

 palm, presumably on the basis of the account of Herodotus, who 

 had traveled in the East in the fifth century B.C. The Arabs and 

 Assyrians, Herodotus found, used to have a special ceremony at a 

 certain time of the year, in which a man climbed up a male tree, 

 brought down the inflorescence, and handed it over to the high 

 priest, who touched the female inflorescences with it, in order to 

 ensure a good supply of dates. 



Approximately three hundred years after Theophrastus, Pliny 

 wrote an encyclopedia of natural history in which he mentioned the 

 male palm with its erect leaves as having somewhat of a military 

 bearing, while the females with their softer foliage and feminine ways 

 bent toward it, to save themselves as it were from the curse of 

 virginity or widowhood. However, Pliny did not make any ob- 

 servations of his own. His writings and ideas were based on other 

 people's reports and on the literature on the subject that existed in 

 those days. 



After this the problem of sexuality in plants seems to have been 

 laid aside and forgotten for hundreds of years. Indeed, many scien- 

 tists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries totally denied the 

 occurrence of sex in plants and regarded even the mention of it as 

 inappropriate and obscene. Some thought the stamens to be ex- 

 cretory organs and the pollen to be a waste product. 



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