family. But I have since on several occasions more explicitly stated that opinion, which, until lately, I always considered the most probable hypothesis on the subject. At the same time its probability in this family appeared to me somewhat less than in Asclepiadeæ. For in Orchideæ a secreting surface in the female organ, apparently destined to act on the pollen without the intervention of any other part, is manifest; and some direct evidence of the fact existed, though not then considered satisfactory. In Asclepiadeæ, however, I entertained hardly any doubt on the subject; the only apparently secreting surface of the stigma in that family being occupied by the supposed conductors of the male influence, and no evidence whatever, with which I was acquainted, existing of its action through any other channel.
In 1816 or 1818 I received from the late celebrated Aubert du Petit Thouars some printed sheets of an intended work on Orchideæ, which, with a few alterations, was completed and published in 1822.[1]
From the unfinished work, as well as that which was afterwards published, it appears that this ingenious botanist considered the glutinous substance connecting the grains or lobules of pollen as the "aura seminalis" or fecundating matter; that the elastic pedicel of the pollen mass, existing in part of the family, but according to him not formed before expansion, consists of this gluten; and that in the expanded flower the gluten which has escaped from the pollen is, in all cases, in communication with the stigma.
He describes the stigma as forming on the surface of 691] the column a glutinous disk, from which a central thread or cord of the same nature is continued through the style to the cavity of the ovarium, where it divides into three branches, and that each of these is again subdivided into two. The six branches thus formed, are closely applied to the parietes of the ovarium, run down on each side of the corresponding placenta to its base, each giving off nume-
- ↑ Hist. des Orchid. p. 14.
