Botany.] 
NATURAL HISTORY. 
543 
manifest perforation, which leads directly to the seminal 
plant,” and by which he supposes the Embryo to have en- 
tered. This perforation is evidently the foramen discovered 
in the seeds of Leguminous plants by Grew, of whose obser- 
vations respecting it he takes no notice, though he quotes 
him in another part of his subject. 
In 1704, Etienne FranQois Geoffroy*, and in 1711, his 
brother Claude Joseph GeofFroyt, in support of the same 
hypothesis, state the general existence of an aperture in the 
unimpregnated vegetable Ovulum. It is not, however, pro- 
bable that these authors had really seen this aperture in the 
early state of the Ovulum in any case, but rather that they 
had merely advanced from the observation of Grew, and the 
conjecture founded on it by Morland, whose hypothesis they 
adopt without acknowledgment, to the unqualified assertion 
of its existence, in all cases. For it is to be remarked, that 
they take no notice of what had previously been observed 
or asserted on the more important parts of their subject, 
while several passages are evidently copied, and the whole 
account of the original state and developement of the Ovu- 
lum is literally translated from Camerarius’s Essay. Nor 
does the younger Geoffrey mention the earlier publication 
of his brother, from which his own memoir is in great part 
manifestly derived. 
In 1718, VaillantJ, who rejects the vermicular hypothesis 
of generation, supposes the influence of the Pollen to con- 
sist in an aura, conveyed by the trachese of the style to the 
ovula, which it enters, if I rightly understand him, by the 
* Qucestio Medica an Hominis primordia Vermis f in auctoris 
Tractatu de Materia Medica^ torn. i. p. 123. 
t Mem. de I' Acad, des Sc. de Parisy 1711, p. 210. 
$ Discours sur la Structure des Fleurs, p. 20- 
