Grew's most interesting contribution to science was, perhaps, his publication of the fact that the flowering plants, like animals, shew the phenomena of sex. He never, however, actually proved this contention in an experimental way. At the time that his earliest work[15] was published, he was frankly puzzled by the stamens, or, as he calls them, the "Attire." He recognised their use to insects, to whom flowers serve, in his own words, as "their Lodging and their Dining-Room." He also fully realised their value to man as increasing the beauty of the blossom, but he was broad-minded enough to feel that these must be secondary uses, and that "the primary and private use of the _attire_" remained to be discovered. Ten years later, in the second edition of his work, he tells us that it was suggested to him in conversation by Sir Thomas Millington that the stamens were the male organs. It seems probable that, although Grew gives Millington the credit for this discovery, he had really arrived at it independently, for he tells us that when Millington made the suggestion, he "immediately reply'd that [he] was of the same Opinion; and gave him some reasons for it, and answered some _Objections_, which might oppose them." Besides his belief in the male nature of the stamen, Nehemiah Grew came to some rather mysterious conclusions as to their serving to draw off the redundant part of the sap, not needed to produce the seed. He also used the word "attire" for the florets of the Compositæ, but qualified it by calling the stamens the "seminal attire," and the florets of compound flowers the "florid attire." He says that "every _Flower_ with the _Florid attire_" (or, as we should now say, "every composite flower") "Embosomes, or is, a _Posy_ of perfect _Flowers_." He recognised the "globulets" (pollen grains) as being of the same nature as those in the anthers of simple flowers. He describes the disk florets with remarkable accuracy, but falls into the error of supposing that the pollen grains are in some cases originally produced by the style and stigmas, which he calls the "Blade," and which he did not recognise as part of the female organ. His figures make it clear that he mistook the stylar hairs for little stalks organically connecting the pollen grains and the style. In other cases, however, he observed that the pollen grains occurred on the inner side of what we now know as the staminal tube.