Tournefort and Pontedera supposed the pollen to be of an excrementitious nature, and thrown off as superfluous. But its being so curiously and distinctly organized in every plant, and producing a peculiar vapour on the accession of moisture, shows, beyond contradiction, that it has functions to perform after it has left the anther. The same writers conceived that the stamens might possibly secrete something to circulate from them to the young seeds; an hypothesis totally subverted by every flower with separated organs, whose stamens could circulate nothing to germens on a different branch or root; a difficulty which the judicious Tournefort perceived, and was candid enough to allow.
munication to Dr. Watson, printed in the preface of Lee's Introduction to Botany, it is called Palma major foliis flabelliformibus, which seems appropriate to Rhapis flabelliformis, Ait. Hort. Kew. v. 3. 473; yet Linnæus, in his Dissertation on this subject, expressly calls it Phœnix dactylifera, the Date Palm, and says he had in his garden many vigorous plants raised from a portion of the seeds above mentioned. The great success of the experiment, and the "fan-shaped" leaves, make me rather take it for the Rhapis, a plant not well known to Linnæus.
