DISCOVERT OF TEE SEXUALITY OF PLANTS. 547 



A hundred years after the discovery of Camerarius a book ap- 

 peared that cast a new and living light on the question of the 

 sexuality of plants. Like the elder one, it also was not appre- 

 ciated by the students of the time. Although Camerarius had 

 shown, between 1691 and 1698, the necessity of the intervention of 

 the pollen in the act of the fecundation of plants or the produc- 

 tion of the seed — or, to use one of Goethe's expressions, that 

 plants gave themselves up, in the bosom of the flower, to the 

 sports of love — the special destination of the different parts of the 

 plant remained a riddle. 



But flowers, with their special properties, the richness of their 

 living colors derived visibly from the green of the leaves, the 

 wonderful variety of their forms, and the perfumes with which 

 they made the air fragrant, continued to attract the attention of 

 the learned world. In 1793 a schoolmaster, the regent Christian 

 Conrad Sprengel, of Spandau, again withdrew the veil, and showed 

 with rare penetration, confining himself to the genus, what were 

 the functions of the organs of the flower, and chiefly of the col- 

 ored petals. The facts he disclosed, and which are now part of 

 the incontestable patrimony of science, appeared so surprising to 

 him that he entitled his book The Mystery of Nature unveiled in 

 the Structure and Fecundation of Plants. He also advised the 

 botanists of his time to study plants in vivo, in Nature, instead of 

 contenting themselves with the examination in their studies of 

 dried and withered specimens in a herbarium. His discovery 

 was of so great importance to the scientific explanation of the 

 functions of the different floral organs that it is hard to explain 

 how his book, still remarkable and interesting, could have passed 

 unnoticed. Incredible as it may appear, it is nevertheless true 

 that his ingenious work remained unknown till 1862, when Charles 

 Darwin, being occupied with the same question, found it and 

 made it known. — Translated for The Popular Science Monthly 

 from the Revue Scientifique. 



Mr. James Ellis Humphrey, in his book on Amherst Trees, Massachusetts, 

 speaks of the Japanese gingko as being very interesting to botanists for represent- 

 ing an extreme type of development in conifers, with much specialized flower and 

 fruit, and for being the survivor dow*n to the present time of this type, which 

 was very abundant and widely distributed over the earth's surface in earlier geo- 

 logic ages. This plant, whose natural habitat has become restricted to China and 

 Japan, would probably itself have disappeared, like its relatives, but for the pecul- 

 iarly religious significance which has in some way become attached to it. This 

 has led to its careful preservation in the temple groves by the Chinese and Japa- 

 nese priests, and it is even stated that it is known only in cultivation, having be- 

 come extinct in the wild ; so that we owe our knowledge of the living tree to a 

 superstition. 



