458 HISTORY OF PHYSIOLOGY, 



a passage of Pliny relative to the fecundation of the 

 date-palm. John Bauhin, in the middle of the 

 seventeenth century, cites the expressions of Zalu- 

 zian ; and forty years later, a professor of Tubingen, 

 Rudolph Jacob Camerarius. pointed out clearly the 

 organs of generation,* and proved by experiments 

 on the mulberry, on maize, and on the plant called 

 mercury (mercurialis), that when by any means the 

 action of the stamina upon the pistils is intercepted, 

 the seeds are barren. Camerarius, therefore, a 

 philosopher in other respects of little note, has the 

 honour assigned him of being the author of the 

 discovery of the sexes of plants in modern times 10 . 



The merit of this discovery will, perhaps, appear 

 more considerable when it is recollected that it 

 was rejected at first by very eminent botanists. Thus 

 Tournefort, misled by insufficient experiments, main- 

 tained that the stamina are excretory organs ; and 

 Reaumur, at the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, inclined to the same doctrine. Upon this, 

 Geoffroy, an apothecary at Paris, scrutinized afresh 

 the sexual organs ; he examined the various forms 

 of the pollen, already observed by Grew and Mal- 

 pighi; he pointed out the excretory canal, which 

 descends through the style, and the micropyle, or 

 minute orifice in the coats of the ovule, which is 

 opposite to the extremity of this canal ; though 

 he committed some mistakes with regard to the 

 nature of the pollen. Soon afterwards. Sebastian 



10 Mirbel, ii. 539. 



