[1098] Biogr. Univ.
He discovers the sexual system. 28. The great discovery ascribed to Grew is of the sexual system in plants. He speaks thus of what he calls the attire, though rather, I think, in obscure terms:—“The primary and chief use of the attire is such as hath respect to the plant itself, and so appears to be very great and necessary. Because even those plants which have no flower or foliature, are yet some way or other attired, either with the seminiform or the floral attire. So that it seems to perform its service to the seeds as the foliature to the fruit. In discourse, hereof, with our learned Savilian professor, Sir Thomas Millington, he told me he conceived that the attire doth serve, as the male, for the generation of the seed. I immediately replied that I was of the same opinion, and gave him some reasons for it, and answered some objections which might oppose them. But withal, in regard every plant is αρρενοθηλυς, or male and female, that I was also of opinion that it serveth for the separation of some parts as well as the affusion of others.”[1099] He proceeds to explain his notion of vegetable impregnation. It is singular that he should suppose all plants to be hermaphrodite, and this shows he could not have recollected what had long been known, as to the palm, or the passages in Cæsalpin relative to the subject.
[1099] Book iv., ch. 1. He had hinted at some “primary and private use of the attire,” in book i., ch. 5.
Camerarius confirms this. 29. Ray admitted Grew’s opinion cautiously at first: Nos ut verisimilem tantum admittimus. But in his Sylloge Stirpium, 1694, he fully accedes to it. The real establishment of the sexual theory, however, is due to Camerarius, professor of botany at Tubingen, whose letter on that subject, published 1694, in the work of another, did much to spread the theory over Europe. His experiments, indeed, were necessary to confirm what Grew had rather hazarded as a conjecture than brought to a test; and he showed that flowers deprived of their stamina do not produce seeds capable of continuing the species.[1100] Woodward, in the Philosophical Transactions, illustrated the nutrition of plants, by putting sprigs of vegetables in phials filled with water, and after some time determining the weight they had gained and the quantity they had imbibed.[1101] These experiments had been made by Van Helmont, who had inferred from them that water is convertible into solid matter.[1102]
[1100] Sprengel. Biogr. Univ. Pulteney, p. 338.
[1101] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 58.
[1102] Thomson’s Hist. of Chemistry.
Predecessors of Grew. 30. It is just to observe that some had preceded Grew in vegetable physiology. Aromatari, in a letter of only four pages, published at Venice in 1625, on the generation of plants from seeds, which was reprinted in the Philosophical Transactions, showed the analogy between grains and eggs, each containing a minute organised embryo, which employs the substances inclosing it for its own development. Aromatari has also understood the use of the cotyledons.[1103] Brown, in his Inquiry into Vulgar Errors, has remarks on the budding of plants, and on the quinary number they affect in their flower. Kenelm Digby, according to Sprengel, first explained the necessity in vegetation for oxygen, or vital air, which had lately been discovered by Bathurst. Hooke carried the discoveries hitherto made in vegetable anatomy much farther in his Micrographia. Sharrock and Lister contributed some knowledge, but they were rather later than Grew. |Malpighi.| None of these deserve such a place as Malpighi, who, says Sprengel, was not inferior to Grew in acuteness, though, probably, through some illusions of prejudice, he has not so well understood and explained many things. But the structure and growth of seeds he has explained better, and Grew seems to have followed him. His book is also better arranged and more concise.[1104] The Dutch did much to enlarge botanical science. The Hortus Indicus Malabaricus of Rheede, who had been a governor in India, was published at his own expense in twelve volumes, the first appearing in 1686; it contains an immense number of new plants.[1105] The Herbarium Amboinense of Rumphius was collected in the seventeenth century, though not published till 1741.[1106] Several botanical gardens were formed in different countries; among others that of Chelsea was opened in 1686.[1107]
[1103] Sprengel. Biogr. Univ.
[1104] Sprengel, p. 15.