that he shows incapacity for the careful investigation of any object at all difficult to observe, and it will now seem a small matter that he, like most of the earlier botanists, treats one-seeded indehiscent fruits as seeds, and hence makes the pappus a part of the seed. (7) By the word ‘receptaculum’ he understands everything by which the parts of the fructification are connected together, both the ‘receptaculum proprium,’ which unites the parts of the single flower, and the ‘receptaculum commune,’ under which term he comprises the most diverse forms of inflorescence (umbel, cyme, spadix). He concludes with the remark that the essence of the flower consists in the anther and the stigma, that of the fruit in the seed, that of the fructification in the flower and the fruit, and that of all vegetable forms in the fructification, and he adds a long list of distinctions between the organs of fructification with their names; among these organs appear the nectaries, which he was the first to distinguish. In the fifth chapter he discusses the question of difference of sex in plants. His views on this subject have been already mentioned in order to show that they were entirely founded on worthless scholastic deductions; here we may quote a few of the propositions which were famous in after times. We assume, he says, that two individuals of different sexes were created in the beginning of things in every kind of living creatures. Plants, though they are without sensation, yet live as do animals, for they have a beginning and an advance in age (aetas), and are liable to disease and death; they have also a power of movement, a natural appetency (propulsio), an anatomy, and an organic structure (organismus). Simple explanations are given of these words, but they prove nothing about the matter. He then expounds the whole theory of sexuality, which is made to rest entirely on scholastic arguments, and in doing this he spins out to excessive length the parallel which he draws between the conditions of sexuality in animals and plants. It is manifestly this chapter of the ‘Philosophia Botanica,’ together with the treatise ‘Sponsalia Plantarum,’ which led the adherents of Linnaeus, who were ignorant of the older literature of the subject and were much impressed by his scholastic dexterity, to celebrate him as the founder of the sexual theory of plants; whereas a more careful study of history shows incontrovertibly that Linnaeus helped in this way to disseminate the doctrine, but did absolutely nothing to establish it.