botanists imbibed the same sentiments. Pontedera, however, at Padua, an university long famous, but then on the decline, and consequently adverse to all new inquiry and information, in 1720 published his Anthologia, quite on the other side of the question.
Linnæus, towards the year 1732, reviewed all that had been done before him, and clearly established the fact so long in dispute, in his Fundamenta and Philosophia Botanica. He determined the functions of the Stamens and Pistils, proved these organs to be essential to every plant, and thence conceived the happy idea of using them for the purpose of systematical arrangement. In the latter point his merit was altogether original; in the former he made use of the discoveries and remarks of others, but set them in so new and clear a light, as in a manner to render them his own.
We have already mentioned, p. 138, the two modes by which plants are multiplied, and have shewn the important difference between them. Propagation by seed is the only genuine reproduction of the species, and it
