Chap, i.] Adherents and Opponents of Sexuality. 



load themselves with pollen in an ordinary tulip bed and !!•. 

 over to his imperfect flowers. After they were gone, he 

 observed that they had left on the stigmas a quantity of pollen 

 sufficient for fertilisation, and these tulips did in fact produa 

 seed. Miller also kept some female plants of spinach apart 

 from the male, and found that they bore large seeds with. out 

 embryos. 



Professor Gleditsch, Director of the Botanic Garden in Ber- 

 lin, described in the same year (' Histoire de l'Academie royale 

 des sciences et des lettres ' for the year 1749, published in 1751 

 at Berlin), an experiment on the artificial fertilisation of Palma 

 dactylifera folio flabelliformi, which was no doubt our Chamae- 

 rops humilis, since he says himself in page 105 that it was 

 Linnaeus' Chamaerops, and Koelreuter speaks of the plant in 

 his report by that name. This treatise, in point of scientific 

 tone and learned handling of the question, is the best that 

 appeared between the time of Camerarius and that of Koel- 

 reuter. We learn from the introduction, that in the year 1749 

 there were few who doubted the existence of sexuality in plants. 

 The author says that he has endeavoured to attain to perfect 

 conviction on the point by many years' experiments with plants 

 of the most various kinds. Of late years he had chiefly selected 

 dioecious plants for investigation, Ceratonia, Terebinthus. 

 Lentiscus, and the species of date-palm which is commonly 

 called Chamaerops. After relating the formation of fertile 

 seeds in Terebinth and the mastic-tree produced by artificial 

 pollination, he turns to Chamaerops, of which species Prince 

 Eugene had repeatedly caused specimens of considerable size 

 to be brought over from Africa ; a specimen cost as much as a 

 hundred pistoles; but they died without flowering. 'Our 

 palm in Berlin,' he continues, ' is a female, and may be eighty 

 years old; the gardener asserts that it has never borne fruit. 

 and I have myself never seen fertile seeds on it during fiftet n 

 years.' As there was no male tree of the kind in Berlin, Gle- 

 ditsch procured some pollen from the garden of Caspar B< >• 



