49^ Mr. Correa de Serra on the 
mg 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, be- 
cause it is at present clearly evinced that these fancied sta- 
mina are only organs of nutrition. 
Cooler observation and reflection exploded at length all 
these dreams ; but Gmelin, and Gtertner, the two greater 
among the naturalists who followed a different way of think- 
ing, 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 fecundation, 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 proceed, 
how groundless is the supposition on which this argument rests. 
Gartner, by far a deeper naturalist than the preceding, 
and keeping more closely to the ways of nature, would, no 
