ceed to state the various observations that have been actually made, and the opinions that have been formed on the subject as briefly as I am able, taking them in chronological order.
In 1672, Grew[1] describes in the outer coat of the seeds of many Leguminous plants a small foramen, placed opposite to the radicle of the Embryo, which, he adds, is "not a hole casually made, or by the breaking off of the stalk," but formed for purposes afterwards stated to be the aeration of the Embryo, and facilitating the passage of its radicle in germination. It appears that he did not consider this foramen in the testa as always present, the functions which he ascribes to it being performed in cases where it is not found, either, according to him, by the hilum itself, or in hard fruits, by an aperture in the stone or shell.
542] In another part of his work[2] he describes and figures, in the early state of the Ovulum, two coats, of which the outer is the testa; the other, his "middle membrane," is evidently what I have termed nucleus, whose origin in the Ovulum of the Apricot he has distinctly represented and described.
Malpighi, in 1675,[3] gives the same account of the early state of the Ovulum; his "secundinæ externæ" being the testa, and his chorion the nucleus. He has not, however, distinguished, though he appears to have seen, the foramen of Grew, from the fenestra and fenestella, and these, to which he assigns the same functions, are merely his terms for the hilum.
In 1694, Camerarius, in his admirable essay on the sexes of plants,[4] proposes, as queries merely, various modes in which either the entire grains of pollen, or their particles after bursting may be supposed to reach and act upon the unimpregnated 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.
- ↑ Anatomy of Veget. begun p. 3. Anat. of Plants, p. 2.
- ↑ Anat. of Plants, p. 210, tab. 80.
- ↑ Anatome Plant. p. 75, et 80.
- ↑ Rudolphi Jacobi Camerarii de sexa plantarum epistola, p. 8. 46, et seq.
