292 
IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE Vor. XXIX, 1922 
riiis conducted his experiments with spinach, hemp, send hops, in 
which the pollen and seed-bearing plants are distinct and also with 
Indian Corn. 
He was the first botanist to discover, two hundred years after 
maize had been introduced into Europe from America, that on 
removing the pollen-bearing flowers from the tassel of an isolated 
corn plant, the seeds on the ears remained unfertilized. 
On page 28 of his book, Camerarius comes to this conclusion 
regarding sex in plants : “They behave indeed to each other as 
the male and femiale, and are otherwise not different from one 
another.” On page 49 he goes on to say: “The difficult question 
which is also a new one, is whether a female plant can be fertilized 
by a male of another kind, the female hemp by the male hop ; the 
castor bean from which one has removed the staminate flowers 
through pollination with the pollen of Turkish wheat (maize) ; 
and whether, in what degree altered, a seedling will arise there- 
from.” 
Camerarius, however, seems never himself to have attempted 
the artificial crossing of plants, and it was a full hundred years 
before his discovery regarding sex in plants received any recog- 
nition whatsoever, and before we find the first recorded instance 
of an actual experiment in hybridization. 
MISCELLANEOUS EXPERIMENTS REGARDING SEX IN PLANTS 
It is of interest to know that the first person who is reported 
to have actually crossed plants artificially, was an Englishman 
named Thomas Fairchild who, according to Bradley, crossed two 
kinds of pinks in i/zp. The cross in question was known still 
to gardeners, one hundred years later, as “Fairchild’s Sweet 
William.” 
In 1731, Philip Miller , in the first edition of his “Gardener’s 
Dictionary” reported his own repetition of Bradley’s experiment 
with seedlings. Miller also grew male and female plants of 
spinach apart, and found that the latter bore seeds which con- 
tained no embryos. 
Eight years later, in 1739, James Logan, an American citizen 
of Irish birth, and at that time governor of Pennsylvania, published 
in Latin an account of his experiments with Indian corn, entitled 
“Experimenta et maletamata de plantarum generatione” (Ex- 
periments and considerations on the generation of plants). 
In 1751, Gleditsch, Director of the Berlin Botanical Garden, 
published an account of an experiment in crossing a species of 
