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Major Velley to J. E. Smith. 
Dear Sir, Bath, Jan. 25, 1795. 
I received yours, and am highly flattered by the 
very favourable, and I fear partial, opinion which 
you express of the work*; especially when you 
condescend to say that you have read it with great 
pleasure and advantage. Whatever difference of 
opinion may subsist upon the meaning of the word 
seeds, and which perhaps should be confined to 
those plants only in which a sexual influence pre- 
vails ; yet the term seems to have been appropri- 
ated to the propagation of plants from the most 
remote antiquity, and long before the discovery of 
any sexual distinction in the vegetable world. Thus 
in the Scriptural account :— 
“Kat e€nveyKev n yn Borayny XOprov, O7TrELpov oTépua 
Kata yévoc [Kat Kal? oporornra | .”—Lib. Gen. cap. ih 
ver. 12. (The word ozeipov, by the by, is hardly 
reducible to grammatical construction.) 
The ancients, who formed their ideas from natu- 
ral objects, probably borrowed the term from the 
mode of propagation observable in plants; and by 
analogy applied it to sexual generation in animals, 
without knowing at the time, that the same princi- 
ple existed in the former. 
Although I had my scruples with respect to the 
application of the term seeds, and for the same rea- 
nard of the ancients, is given in the very learned Hierobotanicon 
of Olaus Celsius, ii. p. 1., where the plant is, as by Sir G. Blane, 
referred to the Grasses. 
* Coloured Figures of Marine Plants of England, folio. 1795. 
