In another part of his work[1] 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,[2] 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,[3] 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.
Mr. Samuel Morland, in 1703,[4] 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 Phascoli, just under one end of what we call the eye, a
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Philosoph. Transact. vol. xxiii, n. 287, p. 1174.
