Ovula, which he had himself
carefully observed. With his usual candour, however, he acknowledges his
obligation on this subject to Malpighi, to whose more detailed account of
them he refers.

(*Footnote. Rudolphi Jacobi Camerarii de sexu plantarum epistola page 8
46 et seq.)

Mr. Samuel Morland, in 1703,* in extending Leeuwenhoek's hypothesis of
generation to plants, assumes the existence of an aperture in the Ovulum,
through which it is impregnated. It appears, indeed, that he had not
actually observed this aperture before fecundation, but inferred its
existence generally and at that period, from having, as he says,
"discovered in the seeds of beans, peas, and Phaseoli, just under one end
of what we call the eye, a manifest perforation, which leads directly to
the seminal plant," and by which he supposes the Embryo to have entered.
This perforation is evidently the foramen discovered in the seeds of
Leguminous plants by Grew, of whose observations respecting it he takes
no notice, though he quotes him in another part of his subject.

(*Footnote. Philosophical Transactions volume 23 n. 287 page 1474.)

In 1704, Etienne Francois Geoffroy,* and in 1711, his brother Claude
Joseph Geoffroy,** in support of the same hypothesis, state the general
existence of an aperture in the unimpregnated vegetable Ovulum. It is
not, however, probable that these authors had really seen this aperture
in the early state of the Ovulum in any case, but rather that they had
merely advanced from the observation of Grew, and the conjecture founded
on it by Morland, whose hypothesis they adopt without acknowledgment, to
the unqualified assertion of its existence, in all cases. For it is to be
remarked, that they take no notice of what had previously been observed
or asserted on the more important parts of their subject, while several
passages are evidently copied, and the whole account of the original
state and development of the Ovulum is literally translated from
Camerarius' Essay. Nor does the younger Geoffroy mention the earlier
publication of his brother, from which his own memoir is in great part
manifestly derived.

(*Footnote. Quaestio Medica an Hominis primordia Vermis? in auctoris
Tractatu de Materia Medica tome 1 page 123.)

(**Footnote. Mem. de l'Acad. des Sc. de Paris 1711 page 210.)

In 1718; Vaillant,* who rejects the vermicular hypothesis of generation,
supposes the influence of the Pollen to consist in an aura, conveyed by