380 History of the Sexual Theory. [BOOK in. 



the stamens as simply envelopes of the foetus; and though 

 he knew, as has been already shown, that in some plants, 

 the hazel, chestnut, Ricinus, Taxus, Mercurialis, Urtica, 

 Cannabis, Mais, the flowers are separate from the fruit, and 

 even mentions that the barren individuals are called male, 

 and the fruit-bearing female, he understood this only as a 

 popular expression, without really admitting a sexual relation. 

 Respecting the words male and female he says at page 15 : 

 ' Quod ideo fieri videtur quia feminae materia temperatior 

 sit, maris autem calidior ; quod enim in fructum transire 

 debuisset, ob superfluam caliditatem evanuit in flores, in 

 eo tamen genere feminas melius provenire et fecundiores 

 fieri aiunt, si juxta mares serantur, ut in palma est animad- 

 versum, quasi halitus quidam ex mari efflans debilem feminae 

 calorem expleat ad fructificandum.' 



There is no mention of the pollen here, still less any attempt 

 to extend what had been observed in dioecious plants to the 

 ordinary cases, in which flowers and pistil, as Cesalpino 

 would say, are united in the same individual. His view of 

 the relation between the seed and the shoot, cited above on 

 page 47, shows that he conceived of the formation of seeds as 

 only a nobler form of propagation than that by buds, but not 

 essentially distinct from it. The idea of sexuality in plants 

 was not in fact consonant with Cesalpino's interpretation of 

 Aristotelian teaching. 



Prosper Alpine's account (1592) of the pollination of the 

 date-palm contains nothing new, except that he had seen it in 

 Egypt himself 1 . 



The Bohemian botanist Adam Zaluziansky - made no obser- 

 vations of his own, but attempted in 1592 to reduce the 



1 See De Candolle, ' Physiologic vegetale,' p. 47. 



2 His 'Methodus Herbaria' is said to have been published in 1592. 

 The remarks in the text are made in reliance on a long quotation from it in 

 Roeper's translation of De Candolle's { Physiologic,' ii. p. 49, who had 

 before him an edition of 1604. 



