owledge
of the organs. From Theophrastus down to Caesalpinus, who died at Rome
in 1603, there does not appear to have been any attention paid to the
reproductive organs of plants. Caesalpinus had his attention directed to
the subject, and he speaks of a halitus or emanation from the male
plants causing fertility in the female.

Nehemiah Grew seems to have been the first to describe, in a paper on
the _Anatomy of Plants_, read before the Royal Society in November 1676,
the functions of the stamens and pistils. Up to this period all was
vague conjecture. Grew speaks of the _attire_, or the stamens, as being
the male parts, and refers to conversations with Sir Thomas Millington,
Sedleian professor at Oxford, to whom the credit of the sexual theory
seems really to belong. Grew says that "when the attire or apices break
or open, the globules or dust falls down on the seedcase or uterus, and
touches it with a prolific virtue." Ray adopted Grew's views, and states
various arguments to prove their correctness in the preface to his work
on European plants, published in 1694. In 1694 R.J. Camerarius,
professor of botany and medicine at Tubingen, published a letter on the
sexes of plants, in which he refers to the stamens and pistils as the
organs of reproduction, and states the difficulties he had encountered
in determining the organs of Cryptogamic plants. In 1703 Samuel Morland,
in a paper read before the Royal Society, stated that the farina
(pollen) is a congeries of seminal plants, one of which must be conveyed
into every ovum or seed before it can become prolific. In this
remarkable statement he seems to anticipate in part the discoveries
afterwards made as to pollen tubes, and more particularly the peculiar
views promulgated by Schleiden. In 1711 E.F. Geoffrey, in a memoir
presented to the Royal Academy at Paris, supported the views of Grew and
others as to the sexes of plants. He states that the germ is never to be
seen in the seed till the apices (anthers) shed their dust; and that if
the stamina be cut out before the apices open, the seed will either not
ripen, or be barren if it ripens. He mentions two experiments made by
him to prove this--one by cutting off the staminal flowers in Maize, and
the other by rearing the female plant of Mercurialis apart from the
male. In these instances most of the flowers were abortive, but a few
were fertile, which he attributes to the dust of the apices having been
wafted by the wind