FECUNDATION. 177 
PHENOMENA OF LIFE IN PLANTS. 
FEcUNDATION—GERMINATION. 
The consideration we have given to the subject of the flower 
and fruit enables us now to enter on two great questions in 
vegetable physiology. Firstly, the influence of the stamens on 
the pistil, or fecundation in plants; secondly, germination. 
FECUNDATION. 
Of all the phenomena in the life of plants, there is none more 
interesting or more remarkable in itself than fecundation. When 
the existence of sexual differences in vegetables was first pro- 
pounded, the discovery produced general astonishment. If the 
most convincing proofs had not established it, if the commonest 
observation had not allowed every one to verify its reality, it 
would, certainly, have been classed among the most singular 
inventions that ever issued from a poet’s imagination. But the 
proofs were convineing. The demonstration of the existence of 
sexual organs in vegetables became a brilliant and unexpected 
fact, exhibiting a wonderful analogy between animals and plants ; 
filling up in part the gulf which had hitherto existed between the 
two great classes of organic beings, yielding an inexhaustible fund 
of reflection and comparison to naturalists and thinking men. 
_. The ancients had very vague ideas on this subject. Yet we 
learn from Herodotus that, in his time, the Babylonians already 
distinguished two sorts of Date Palms; they sprinkled the pollen 
of one on the flower of the other in order to perfect the production 
of the fruit of that valuable tree. 
Césalpin, an Italian philosopher, physician, and naturalist, who, — 
in the 16th century, was professor of medicine and botany at Pisa, 
remarked that certain sets of Mercurialis and Hemp remained 
sterile, while others were productive. He considered the first as 
the male sets and the second as the female. In the 17th century, 
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