Till 



INTRODUCTION. 



;exual relationship had indeed prevailed even from the time 

 dea was founded the practice of caprification. 



of Aristotle, and on this 



Linnaeus indeed, in his Hortus 



tianus 



boldly declared that the Caprifig and Fig were 



iy 



m 



Cliffor- 



female of the 



Linnaeus knew that the Caprifig was practically a male, for he says the 



same species. 



male Fig (Caprifig) is formed of male florets an 



of female florets, and of those th 



e 



females are sterile: the female (Fig) is composed of female florets only. But botanists 



subsequent to Linnaeus regarded the Caprifig and Fig as distinct species 



This 



was 



MiquePs view, even 



m 



his 



latest rearrangement of the 



genus; and Gasparrini 



, as we 



have seen, formed Caprifig 



and Ficm each into a monospecific genus. Another favourite 



opinion has also been that the two forms are races of one plant, the Caprifi 



g being the 



wild race and the Fig the race which has been produced by cultivation 

 view which Count Solms-Laubach maintained and defended with much skill 



This 



was the 



m a 



paper 



published so lately as 1882.* The chief support of this view is really the fact that 



gst the gall flowers of the Caprifi 



g there are occasionally developed perfect female 



flo 



which become fertilised and yield seed. Thus Grasp 



• • 



states that, by carefull 



examining the contents of forty 



them twenty perfect embryo-containing achenes 



ptacles of Caprifig, he succeeded in obtaining fro 



The view which Count Solms-Laubach 



at first adhered to was combated by Fritz Muller, who maintained the 



that the two are but the male and female plants of 



opinion of Linnae 



impressed was Solms-Laubach by Muller^ 

 in order to be able to examine the fresh 



one and the same species 



o 



guments, that he undertook a journey to Java 

 ceptacles of other species witli the view of 



discovering what the disposition of the flowers in these might be. The results he found 

 to be confirmatory of Mailer's theory and contradictory of his own, and, with a magnau- 



lmous candour which 



and adopted that of his critic 

 Laubach discovered the true natur 



unfortunately too uncommon, he publicly abjured his own theory 



It was during this investigation that Count Sol 



of the gall flowers 



V. Cariea is not an Indo-Malayan species, bnt I have referred to it at such lenirtl 



not only on account of the interest that attends the final settlement of 

 ntroversy, but because this species 



a long-pendfn 



which obtain 



to Java 



large proportion of the species of the genus 



illustrates in an extreme form the arrangement 



Count Solms-Laubaci 



i 



went 



expecting that the dimorphism in the receptacles respectively containing the male 



oth 



d female flowers which obtains 



, and, all through 



species 



Ficus Cariea would be found to be characterist 



his interesting and remarkable 



to which I have already referred 



> 



the 



C of 



paper in Botanische Zeiiuay 



matter of fact, howeve 



nfluence of this expectat 



is traceable 



> 



dimorphism in the male 



As 



a 



and in hardly any other case 



female 



ptacl 



is it so strongly marked as in F. Cariea 



the except 



? 



12Z3L irS £=i*?*r d :° — «- **-*-. («- cw, l,. 



:^^-- A ^ «*-»»**« B«i a. >zzzz:z 



schaften zu Gottingen, 1882. 



Von Grafen 

 Koniglichen Gessellschaft der Wissen- 



