40 



FUNCTIONS OF 



teenth century, was one of the most able and original. 

 Vaillant wrote an excellent oration on the subject, 

 which being hostile to the opinions of Tournefort, lay 

 in obscurity till published by Boerhaave. Blair and 

 Bradley assented in England, and several continental 

 botanists imbibed the same sentiments. Pontedera, 

 however, at Padua, an university long famous,, but then 

 on the decline, and consequently adverse to all new 

 inquiry and information, in 1720 published his An- 

 thologia, quite on the other side of the question. 



Linnasus, towards the year 1732, reviewed all that 

 had been done before him, and clearly established the 

 fact so long in dispute, in his Fundamenta and Philo- 

 sophia Botanica. He determined the functions of the 

 Stamens and Pistils, proved these organs to be essential 

 to every plant, and thence conceived the happy idea of 

 using them for the purpose of systematical arrangement. 

 In the latter point his merit was altogether original ; in 

 the former he made use of the discoveries and remarks 

 of others, but set them in so new and clear a light, as 

 in a manner to render them his own. 



We have already mentioned,/;. 106, the two modes 

 by which plants are multiplied, and have shown the 

 important difference between them. Propagation by 

 seed is the only genuine reproduction of the species, 

 and it now remains to prove that the essential organs 

 of the flower are indispensably requisite for the per- 

 fecting of the seed. 



Every one must have observed that the flower of a 



