Chap, ii.] Organs from Cesalpino to Linnaeus. 



97 



tion and distinction could be given in 1751, and again in 1770, 

 by the first botanist of his time, when Malpighi and Grew, 

 nearly a hundred years earlier, had illustrated the parts of the 

 seed and even the history of its development and its ger- 

 mination by numerous figures. He does not mention the 

 endosperm, evidently confounding it with the cotyledon, though 

 Ray had already distinguished it clearly from the other parts 

 of the seed. Linnaeus' terminology of the seed supplies more 

 than sufficient corroboration of our previous remark, that he 

 shows incapacity for the careful investigation of any object 

 at all difficult to observe, and it will now seem a small matter 

 that he, like most of the earlier botanists, treats one-seeded 

 indehiscent fruits as seeds, and hence makes the pappus a part 

 of the seed. (7) By the word ' receptaculum ' he understands 

 everything by which the parts of the fructification are con- 

 nected together, both the 'receptaculum proprium,' which 

 unites the parts of the single flower, and the ' receptaculum 

 commune,' under which term he comprises the most diverse 

 forms of inflorescence (umbel, cyme, spadix). 



He concludes with the remark that the essence of the flower 

 consists in the anther and the stigma, that of the fruit in the seed, 

 that of the fructification in the flower and the fruit, and that of 

 all vegetable forms in the fructification, and he adds a long 

 list of distinctions between the organs of fructification with 

 their names ; among these organs appear the nectaries, which 

 he was the first to distinguish. 



In the fifth chapter he discusses the question of difference of 

 sex in plants. His views on this subject have been already 

 mentioned in order to show that they were entirely founded on 

 worthless scholastic deductions ; here we may quote a few of the 

 propositions which were famous in after times. We assume, he 

 says, that two individuals of different sexes were created in the 

 beginning of things in every kind of living creatures. Plants, 

 though they are without sensation, yet live as do animals, for 

 they have a beginning and an advance in age (aetas), and are 



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