The case of the botanists above-mentioned is simply one of ignorance; in the botanical philosopher Cesalpino on the contrary we see a consequence of the Aristotelian system, which leads him distinctly to reject the hypothesis of separate sexual organs in plants as opposed to their nature. It is difficult to understand how De Candolle, at page 48 of his ‘Physiologie végétale,’ can say that Cesalpino recognised the presence of sexes in plants. His conception of vegetable seed-grains as analogous to the male seed in animals must have made it impossible for him to understand sexuality in plants. So too his notion that the seed is derived from the pith as the principle of life in plants, in connection with which he says at page 11 of the first of his sixteen books; ‘Non fuit autem necesse in plantis genituram aliquam distinctam a materia secerni, ut in animalibus, quae mari et femina distinguuntur.’ He regarded the parts of the flower which surround the ovary, or are separate from it, together with the stamens as simply envelopes of the foetus; and though he knew, as has been already shown, that in some plants, the hazel, chestnut, Ricinus, Taxus, Mercurialis, Urtica, Cannabis, Mais, the flowers are separate from the fruit, and even mentions that the barren individuals are called male, and the fruit-bearing female, he understood this only as a popular expression, without really admitting a sexual relation. Respecting the words male and female he says at page 15: ‘Quod ideo fieri videtur quia feminae materia temperatior sit, maris autem calidior; quod enim in fructum transire debuisset, ob superfluam caliditatem evanuit in flores, in eo tamen genere feminas melius provenire et fecundiores fieri aiunt, si juxta mares serantur, ut in palma est animadversum, quasi halitus quidam ex mari efflans debilem feminae calorem expleat ad fructificandum.’ There is no mention of the pollen here, still less any attempt to extend what had been observed in dioecious plants to the ordinary cases, in which flowers and pistil, as Cesalpino would say, are united in the same individual. His view of the relation between the seed and the shoot, cited above on page 47, shows that he conceived of the formation of seeds as only a nobler form of propagation than that by buds, but not essentially distinct from it. The idea of sexuality in plants was not in fact consonant with Cesalpino’s interpretation of Aristotelian teaching. Prosper Alpino’s account (1592) of the pollination of the date-palm contains nothing new, except that he had seen it in Egypt himself[94].