The Bohemian botanist Adam Zaluziansky[95] made no observations of his
own, but attempted in 1592 to reduce the traditional knowledge on the
subject to some kind of theory. The foetus, he says, is a part of the
nature of plants, which they produce out of themselves, and is thus
distinguished from the shoot which grows from the plant, as a part
from the whole, but the other as a whole from a whole. He quotes Pliny
almost word for word where he says, that observers of nature maintain
that all plants are of both sexes, but in some the sexes are conjoined,
in others they are separate; in many plants the male and female are
united, and these have the power of propagation in themselves, like
many androgynous animals; and he explains this, more explicitly than
Aristotle, from defect of locomotion in plants. This is the case, he
says, with the majority of plants. In some, as the palm, the male
and female are separated, and the female without the male produces
no fruit, and where the dust from the male does not reach the female
plant by natural means, man can assist. Zaluziansky like other writers
is anxious that plants of different sexes should not be taken for
different species. He refers also to the popular distinction of many
plants into male and female according to certain external peculiarities.
Jung again must certainly have known the facts and views that were
current in his time; but there is nothing in his botanical writings to
show that he entertained the idea of a real sexuality in plants, of the
necessity of the co-operation of two sexes in the work of propagation.
It might almost be believed that the most learned and serious men, such
as Cesalpino and Jung, were just those, who regarded the hypothesis of
sexuality in plants as an absurdity, and shrunk from its consideration.
This impression is conveyed too by Malpighi’s ‘Anatomie des Plantes.’
It was Malpighi who gave the first careful account of the development
of the seed, and studied the earlier stages in the growth of the embryo
in the embryo-sac; and yet even he says nothing of the co-operation
of the dust contained in the anthers in the formation of the embryo,
and does not once mention the views of former writers. Malpighi,
like Cesalpino, regarded the formation of seeds as only another kind
of ordinary bud-formation, and propagation as only another kind of
nutrition. He mentions (p. 52) incidentally that plants with unfruitful
flowers are designated as male, but treats this as a popular expression
merely, and ultimately propounds the theory that the stamens and the
floral envelopes remove a portion of the sap from the flower, in order
to purify the sap for the production of the seeds (p. 56).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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