298 QUARTERLY CHRONICLE OF MICROSCOPICAL SCIENCE. 
adaptations which nutrition requires are in the highest degree 
complicated in the one kingdom, while they always remain 
tolerably simple in the other. Of the two functions, there- 
fore, which divide between them vegetable life, reproduction 
—by which of course sexual reproduction is meant—becomes 
in the case of plants of far greater morphological importance 
than nutrition. 
The following brief sketch of the rise and progress of our 
knowledge of the sexual reproduction, more especially of 
Thallophytes, is instructive as showing how much more 
influence on the whole a deductive method of investigation 
has had than an inductive. It is true that we can see now 
that but little real progress could in any case have been 
made without modern microscopes. But an equally essential 
condition was that investigation should be carried on with- 
out preconceived ideas, and it is impossible to look through 
the literature without seeing that generally it was felt to 
be much more important to make structural arrangements 
agree with theory than to try to ascertain their real nature. 
The phenomena of sexual reproduction in plants was 
more or less familiar to even classical writers on natural 
history. Pliny was aware that the female flowers of the 
Date could not produce fruit unless the ‘ pulvis maris ” had 
been scattered upon them from neighbouring trees. But in 
modern times the first distinct recognition of the sexuality 
of plants is generally attributed to Sir Thomas Millington, 
Savilian Professor at Oxford, who in 1676 communicated 
his ideas as far as flowering plants are concerned in conver- 
sation to Grew.! Sprengel considers that to Bobart, ‘‘ over- 
seer of the physick gardens at Oxford,” belongs the credit of 
having, in 1681, first actually demonstrated experimentally 
(on Lychnis dioica) the function of pollen. The account is 
given in Blair’s ‘ Botanick Essays ’ (1720), p. 243, but it must 
be confessed it is not very conclusive. ‘The experiments of 
Camerarius (1694), a professor at Tubingen, upon hemp 
and some other plants, were much more to the point. The 
sexuality of flowering plants was further developed in 
England by Samuel Morland (1705), and in France by 
Geoffroy (1711), and Vaillant (1718). The discovery was 
very soon over-generalised ; from this time till the end of 
the eighteenth century most of the writers on structural 
botany deserve the censure passed by Sprengel® on Micheli 
(1729): “quod ubique partes duplicis sexus invenisse 
fingeret.” 
1 * Anatomy of Plants,’ p. 171. 
* « Wistoria rei herbariz,’ vol. il, p. 232. 
