358 Mr. Robert Brown on the Structure of the 
purposes afterwards stated to be the aération of the Embryo, 
and facilitating the passage of its radicle in germination. It 
appears that he did not consider this foramen in the testa as 
always present, the functions which he ascribes to it being per- 
formed in cases where it is not found, either, according to him, 
by the hilum itself, or in hard fruits, by an aperture in the 
stone or shell. 
In another part of his work * he describes and figures, in 
the early state of the Ovulum, two coats, of which the outer is 
the testa; the other, his ‘ middle membrane,” is evidently 
what I have termed nucleus, whose origin in the Ovulum of 
the Apricot he has distinctly represented and described. 
Malpighi, in 1675 +, gives the same account of the early 
state of the Ovulum;; his “‘ secundinze externze” being the testa, 
and his chorion the nucleus. He has not, however, distin- 
uished, though he appears to have seen, the foramen of Grew, 
Ford the fenestra and fenestella, and these, to which he assigns 
the same functions, are merely his terms for the hilum. 
In 1694, Camerarius, in his admirable essay on the sexes of 
plants {, proposes, as queries merely, various modes in which 
either the entire grains of pollen, or their particles after burst- 
ing, may be supposed to reach and act upon the unimpreg- 
nated Ovula, which he had himself carefully observed. With 
his usual candour, however, he acknowledges his obligation on 
this subject to Malpighi, to whose more detailed account of 
them he refers. 
Mr. Samuel Morland, in 1703§, in extending Leeuwen- 
hoek’s hypothesis of generation to plants, assumes the existence 
of an aperture in the Ovulum, through which it is impregnated. 
It appears, indeed, that he had not actually observed this aper- 
ture before fecundation, but inferred its existence generally 
and at that period, from having, as he says, ‘ discovered in 
the seeds of beans, peas, and Phaseoli, just under one end of 
what we call the eye, a manifest perforation, which leads di- 
rectly to the seminal plant,” and by which he supposes the 
Embryo to have entered. This perforation is evidently the 
foramen discovered in the seeds of Leguminous plants by Grew, 
of whose observations respecting it he takes no notice, though 
he quotes him in another part of his subject. 
In 1704, Etienne Francois Geoffroy ||, and in 1711, his bro- 
ther Claude Joseph Geoffroy 4, in support of the same hypo- 
* Anat. of Plants, p. 210. tab. 80. + Anatome Plant. p. 75 et 80. 
}{ Rudolphi Jacobi Camerarii de sexu plantarum epistola, p. 8, 4G, et seq. 
§ Philosoph. Transact. vol. xxiii. n. 287. p. 1474. 
|| Questio Medica an Hominis primordia Vermis? in auctoris Tvractatu de 
Materia Medica, tom. i. p. 123. 
q Mem, del Acad. des Sc. de Paris, 1711, p. 210. 
thesis, 
