29 



gall-fly ill their fruit." Herodotus wiis iu error in regard to the presence 

 of the gall fly in the palm, and it is said that Theophrastus was the first 

 to point out the inaccuracy in the statement. This brilliant and gifted 

 pupil of Aristotle was probably the foremost of all ancient botanists, for, 

 it is said, he knew six hundred plants. The ideas of Theophrastus upon 

 this subject seemed to be more definite tlian those of his great teacher. He 

 regards the palir> and terebintlis as being some male and some female, for 

 "it is certain," lie says, "that among plants of the same species some produce 

 flowers and some do not; male palms, for instance, bear flowers, the female 

 only fruit." Let it be borne iu mind here that neither Theophrastus nor 

 the botanists of tiie i(>th and 17th centuries considered the rudiment of 

 the fruit to be a part of the flower. Theophrastus probably added very 

 little to the Ivuowledge of sexuality in i>lants which had been handed down 

 to him either in the form of tradition or through the scanty writings 

 upon natural history. That he seemed to have made no observations upon 

 the subject, but to liave relied in a large measure upon heresay, is ap- 

 parent from the following: "What men say that the fruit of the female 

 date-palm does not i)erfect itself unless the blossom of the male with its 

 dust is shaken over it, is indeed wonderful, but it resembles the caprification 

 of the fig, and it might almost be concluded that the female plant is not 

 by itself sufficient for the perfecting of the foetus." In the time of Pliny, 

 this idea of sexual dilterence in plants had been pretty well confirmed in 

 the minds of educated men. In his "Historia Mundi," in describing the re- 

 lation between the male and female date-palm, Pliny calls the pollen-dust 

 the materia] of fertilization, and says that naturalists tell us that all trees 

 and even herbs have the two sexes. 



Now while the ancients had some notion of sex in plants, their ideas 

 were based chiefly upon certain apparent analogies with animals. It must 

 be borne in mind that whilst the ancients attributed to the pollen the power 

 of fertilization they had no notion that this fertilization was anything 

 further than some unexplained subtile influence of the flower dust upon 

 the fruit. However, ^^e should wonder only at how much they knew in 

 the days or" Herodotus and Theophrastus as compared with the progress 

 of knowledge made along this line during the following two thousand 

 years: for tlje time from Aristotle to the discovery of the cell by Robert 

 Hooke, the publication of the great works on anatomy by Malpighi and 

 Grew, and the experiments of Camerarins in the latter part of the 17th 

 century, was a lapse of long and dreary centuries in the history of science. 



