182 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1751. 



near his garden, had for 30 years produced only male flowers, but that for 3 

 years past it had produced plenty of fruit. 



The foundation of the discovery of the real sex of plants, which is of no less 

 importance in natural history, than that of the circulation of the blood in the 

 animal economy, was laid by the members of this learned Society ; though much 

 of the honour due to them is attributed by foreigners to the late ingenious Mons. 

 Vaillant of Paris : and this may have arisen from our language not being gene- 

 rally understood on the rx)ntinent. Sir Thomas Millington, sometime Sedleian 

 lecturer of natural philosophy at Oxford, as we see by our worthy member Dr. 

 Grew's anatomy of plants, seems first to have assigned a more noble purpose to 

 the stamina and apices of flowers, than that which had been attributed by pre- 

 ceding writers, and by Mons. Tournefort afterwards; viz. that of secreting some 

 excrementitious juices, which were supposed hurtful to the embryos of the fruit. 

 Sir Thomas conjectured, and rightly, " that the stamina and apices served as 

 the male for the generation of seed." This hint, which was afterwards adopted 

 by Mr. Ray, in the preface to his Sylloge Stirpium Exterarum, Dr. Grew carried 

 farther, as we find by his works ; and it was followed by Camerarius, professor 

 at Tubingen: but our member Mr. Morland, afterwards pursued this inquiry 

 much higher, as we see by his memoir published in the Phil. Trans. N° 287. 

 After these, Messrs. Vaillant and Geofiroy illustrated and strengthened these 

 discoveries by very curious experiments; so that now nothing seems wanting for 

 the confirmation of the truth of this doctrine. 



So much for the discovery of the sex of plants in general, on which Linneus 

 has founded his system of botany, at present so much and so well received. 

 Whoever therefore would consider minutely the structure of flowers, and the al- 

 most infinite variety of the number and disposition of their parts, may consult 

 Linneus's Philosophia Botanica lately published, where this subject is treated in a 

 very copious and instructive manner, 



XXPI. On a small Species of fVasps.* By Mr. John Harrison of Cambridge, 



in New England, p. 184. 



About the 28th of May, Mr. H. discovered hanging to the roof on the inside 

 of a green-house (which was of wood) something about the size of a child's farthing 

 ball, in shape like a Provence rose full grown, before it opens, that is, a round 

 bottom, ending in a blunt point , at which point was a round hole, large enough 

 for insects (something less than a wasp) to go in and out at. He soon perceived 

 that it was the work of insects, a small species of wasps. They have 6 legs, 



* See a pretty good representation of nests of this kind in the 6th vol. of Reaumur's Hist, of 

 Insects, pi. 19. 



