

SECT. II. REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS. 217 



This was of course an unanswerable argument, 

 and a discovery of the utmost importance to the 

 cryptogamist ; and yet Hill's work has fallen into 

 such unavoidable disrepute, that the service he thus 

 rendered to the cause of botany is scarcely ever 

 heard of. 



But by thus disproving the opinion of Linnaeus Whose 

 with regard to the anthers of the Mosses, he was Jhe^sexual 

 now under the necessity of looking out for the true or s ans 1S 



f proved to 



anthers in some other part of the flower or plant, be errone- 

 ous by 

 which he at last discovered, as he thought, in the -Hill. 



same flower, and in what he called the rays of the 

 corona. But this opinion was soon found to be who ex- 

 equally erroneous with that which he had just re-^^,^ 

 futed, because it supposed the flowers of all Mosses viewinhis 



/ * m turn. 



to be hermaphrodite, which they are not in fact ; 

 and because the flowers of many of them are desti- 

 tute of a corona altogether. 



Several other opinions were subsequently advanc- 

 ed by Meese, Koelreuter, and Miller, hostile to 

 the former and to each other, and tending only 

 to show that the most profound mystery still en- 

 veloped the subject, or to introduce a degree of 

 botanical scepticism inconsistent with impartial re- 

 search, which discovered itself even in the celebrated 

 Necker ; urging him tb exclaim rather too rashly that, 

 whatever had been or might in future be said of the 

 fructification of the Mosses he was determined to 

 Regard as a fiction or dream. 



In this stage of progress the celebrated Hedwig Researches 



ofHcdwig. 



