Flora Unveiled

316 i Flora Unveiled

The illustrations utilized by the Bavarian botanist Leonhart Fuchs matched Weiditz’s
scientific accuracy but avoided showing incidental damage, which is a property of the
individual plant rather than the species as a whole. Fuch’s great herbal, De Historia
Stirpum (1542), included 512 woodcuts of wild and domesticated species, using plants
growing in local fields and gardens. Among these were the first complete portraits of two
exotic species from the New World, “Turkish Corn”^57 (maize) (Figure 11.7B) and red chili
peppers.

Adam Zaluziansky: The Last of the Scholastic Botanists

The botanical writings of the late Renaissance Bohemian scholar Adam Zaluziansky
have sometimes been cited as a forerunner of the early modern sexual theory of plants.^58
Zaluziansky made the important distinction between seeds and buds, and, in his book
Methodi Herbariae Libri Tres (1592), he stated that seeds, unlike buds, required some sort of
sexual fertilization. In support of this distinction, he paraphrased Pliny’s description of the
impregnation of female date palms:

If the male plant has been cut, the widowed female plants afterwards become sterile,

which normally conceives by means of raised hairs, breezes, by the sight of him, and

even by the dust, while leaning towards him with caressing hair. Art and human skill

help this understanding of love, once the sexual act has been completed, and the male

flower, down, and dust have been sprinkled on the females.

Like Pliny, Zaluziansky claimed that all plants reproduced sexually, and he went on to
compare the majority of plants to the hermaphroditic fish, the sea bream, called “erythinis”
by the Greeks, and to the “androgynes” (hermaphrodites) of humans. Zaluzianky’s com-
parison of plants to hermaphroditic animals was indeed novel and seemed to imply that
typical flowers contained both male and female sexual structures. For these reasons, some
historians of botany have credited Zaluziansky with anticipating the actual discovery of sex
in plants.
However, a closer reading of chapter XXIIII, “On the Sex of Plants,” suggests that,
despite his reference to pollination in date palms, he is merely restating Aristotelian doc-
trine regarding hermaphroditic flowers, as in the following passage:

But all the things that are reproduced by the earth have entrusted to a most diligent

Nature that plants even more so have both sexes. For some of these it is confused,

for others separated. Indeed certain single [plants] have of themselves the capacity to

generate something else, when the principles of maleness and femaleness have been

mixed, and that is by the best plan of nature.^59

In this passage, Zaluziansky, following Aristotle’s example, distinguishes between dioe-
cious plants composed of two sexes and hermaphroditic plants in which “maleness and
femaleness have been mixed.” Later, he correctly states that most plants fall into the latter
category. However, Zaluziansky fails to associate maleness or femaleness in hermaphroditic