43 



on the style, from its young state till shortly after the changes that take 

 place in the ovulum,*or about that time, there appear certain obscure 

 grains, whiqh at first sight have some resemblance to those of pollen. 

 On attentive examination they proved to be little glands with the ap- 

 pearance of wrinkled grains, composed of cellular tissue; and as they 

 first appear so they remain. The same grains appear also in the capri- 

 fig and in exotic figs. Besides, it appears that the style has not the 

 tissue for conducting the pollen, unless you would give that name to 

 the internal part of the style, formed of longer and more slender cells 

 than those of the exterior, as may be so frequently observed in length- 

 ened slender organs of numerous dicotyledonous plants. Thus every 

 attempt on my part to discover any need of the fecundating substance 

 of stamens to produce the embryo had failed. And, if I am not mis- 

 taken, this is not an isolated fact in the science, Mr. J. Smith having 

 (Transactions of the Linnsean Society, 1840) already announced that 

 the female of a dioecious plant, indigenous to New Holland, of the family 

 of Euphorbiacese, called by him Coelebogyne, bears in London* fertile 

 seeds without a male flower having been discovered on it, and without 

 any suspicion that it could have been impregnated by the pollen of any 

 allied plant; and whoever, in answer to what I have stated of the fig, 

 should allege the assertion of Linnaeus, that this tree only produces 

 good fruit where the caprifig grows, must recollect what I have said 

 respecting it that differences in climate and season more or less hot cause 

 more or less of the seeds to remain empty, and that on that account, in 

 the northern parts of Europe and in stoves, the seeds would probably 

 always remain sterile. 



So it is with our Vernino fig, as to the fruits which it ripens in the 

 open air in November and December, and with that treble-bearing La 

 Cava fig, which will sometimes ripen in a room in the depth of winter. 

 On the other hand, the appearance of the summer figs at a time when 

 the flower-heads of the caprifig are in a state of perfection, the insect 

 ready to come out, shows in a manner a final cause, which can hardly 

 be anything but fecundation. This consideration has always deterred 

 me from publishing the results of the above-mentioned experiments, 

 and has been the cause of my repeating them so often. What may be 

 really the design of nature in this combination I confess I am ignorant 

 of. Nor do I pretend, with the single example of the fig, to disprove 

 so universal a fact as is the necessity of the concurrence of pollen and 

 impregnation for the generating of the seminal embryo, proved by innum- 

 erable experiments made by so many distinguished men for a century 

 back. I only state what I have seen in this plant, it being possible that 

 others with a more acute judgment than my own may loosen the knot 

 and discover one of the numerous contrivances by which nature meets so 

 frequently her wants, when for the fulfilling of some particular end she 

 adopts secret and complicated modes, with strange and unusual dis- 

 guises. 



9. Does the Fly Cause the Setting and afterwards the Early Maturity 

 of the Fig by the Puncture it makes in it? The ancients believed that 

 the quantity of humor in the fig might be the cause of the late ripen- 

 ing of its fruits, or by suffocating them that of their falling off when 

 still sour, and that whatever diminished the quantity of humor, if, it 



* At Kew Gardens. 



