VOL. LXXXVI.] PHELOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 6Q 



opinion, that these hairs have no antherae, and still more unlucky that their exist- 

 ence has no relation at all to that of the vesicles which bear the grains, for they 

 are persistent through all the life of the plant, without any remarkable alteration. 

 Their situation besides is very unfit for the fecundation of the grains, except in 

 the Fucus elongatus. Notwithstanding the weight of these objections, which he 

 did not conceal, this otherwise sensible naturalist tried to the last to support by hy- 

 potheses, what he could not fairly prove by observations. His great name, joined 

 to the general ascendancy which the sexual system gained a little after all over Europe, 

 gave however a common currency to his opinion; and it was received, though in a 

 wavering manner, by Linnaeus himself, and, what is more surprizing, by the last 

 of the Jussieus. These great men indeed gave it as the prevailing opinion of the day, 

 not confirmed by any sanction of theirs. This was not the case of less profound 

 botanists; for they, as the fashion then was, attempted to see stamina and antherae, 

 like the common ones, wherever they had not been observed before. I deem it 

 unnecessary to stop a moment to consider the multitude of supposed stamina, 

 which Donati, Griselini, and others, imagined they had found in Fuci, and Ulvae, 

 because it is at present clearly evinced that these fancied stamina are only organs of 

 nutrition. 



Cooler observation and reflection exploded at length all these dreams; but Gmelin, 

 and Gasrtner, the two greater among the naturalists who followed a different way of 

 thinking, went perhaps too far on the opposite side. Gmelin convinced both by 

 reason and observation of the inutility of the Reaumurian antherae, and writing at 

 a time when the recent publications on the hydrae, and on the aphides, had made it 

 fashionable to find examples of multiplication of organized bodies without fecunda- 

 tion, determined to consider these plants as in the same predicament. Every one 

 may see, in his Historia Fucorum, the elaborate discussion by which he endeavours 

 to establish his opinion. It dazzles at first sight, but, on a candid examination, all 

 his arguments, when deprived of the apparatus of science which accompanies them, 

 may be reduced to the following ; namely, that since the supposed male organs are 

 not such in reality, and no others are to be found, the small grains which act as 

 seeds are prolific, without receiving external fecundation. We shall see as we pro- 

 ceed, how groundless is the supposition on which this argument rests. 



Gasrtner, by far a deeper naturalist than the preceding, and keeping more closely 

 to the ways of nature, would doubtless have given us the true and simple account 

 of the fructification of the submersed algae, if the specious Adansonian theory of 

 aphrodite plants, and his own ideas of the perfect seed, had not in my opinion led 

 him astray. The grains of the ceramiums and ulvae, and the lateral internodia of 

 the confervae, he excludes from the number of seeds, and' believes them to be gems 

 of a particular kind, which he calls gongyli, or gemmae carpomorphae, consequently 

 not standing in need of fecundation. The grains of the fuci he judges to be true 

 seeds; but in this case he believes that the uterus performs the male functions, and 

 that the plants, in respect to their fecundation, are aphroditae, having only the ap- 



