Chap, i.] Rudolph Jacob Camerarius. 389 



in animals. The authority of the ancients was still gr< 

 that time, for Camerarius thinks it necessary to insist that tin- 

 views of Aristotle, Empedocles, and Theophrastus are noi 

 opposed to his sexual theory. Camerarius appears as the 

 true investigator of nature, endowed with the true discerning 

 spirit in disregarding the question which had already been 

 raised with respect to animals, whether the ovum or the 

 matozoid (vermis) produces the foetus, because the first thing 

 to be done was to establish the fact of a sexual difference, not 

 the mode of generation ; he thinks it certainly desirable to 

 examine and see what the pollen-grains contain, how far they 

 penetrate into the female parts, whether they advance uninjured 

 as far as the seed which receives them, or what they discharge 

 if they burst before reaching it. He does full justice to Grew^ 

 services in connection with the knowledge of the pollen and its 

 function. 



It does all honour to the scientific spirit in Camerarius, that 

 he raises a number of objections to his own theory ; one was. 

 that Lycopods and Equisetaceae produce, as he thinks, no 

 young plants from their pollen; he suspected therefore that 

 they have no seed. It should be remembered that the germi- 

 nation of Equisetaceae and Lycopods was not observed till the 

 19th century. An objection, more important at the time, was 

 that a third ear of a castrated maize plant contained eleven 

 fertile seeds, of whose origin he could give no account. He 

 was even more disturbed by finding that three plants of hemp 

 taken from the field and cultivated in the garden prodiuvd 

 fertile seeds, and he tries to explain it by supposing various 

 ways in which pollination might have taken place unobserved. 

 This led him to make a fresh experiment ; next year he | 

 a pot containing seedlings of hemp in a closed room : thrtt 

 male and three female plants grew up; the three male 

 cut off (not by himself) before their flowers opened ; the female 

 produced a great number of abortive seeds, but also .1 

 many fruitful ones. His opponents and those who sought t<> 



