Flora Unveiled

338 i Flora Unveiled

Collegium Curiosum sive Experimentale, a German scientific society, in 1672. Partly because
Germany was not yet a unified nation, German scientific societies of the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries tended to be smaller, more local, and less stable than their coun-
terparts in Italy, France, and England.^38 Consequently, members of German scientific soci-
eties often sought dual memberships in the larger European societies. Sturm was a foreign
member of the British Royal Society and published some of the findings of the Collegium
Curiosum in the Royal Society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions. Like Camerarius, Sturm
was also a great admirer of Boyle and had written an article praising Boyle’s essay, “Tractatus
de Ipsa Natura” (A Treatise Concerning Nature). Like Boyle, Sturm believed that the human
mind was incapable of grasping divine laws through reasoning alone. All three believed that
progress in science could only be achieved through experimentation.
In his landmark De Sexu Plantarum Epistola,^39 Camerarius cited three authors whose
views supported his own:  Grew, Ray, and Sturm. Compared to Grew and Ray, Sturm is
a relatively obscure figure in early modern science. Tübingen had no scientific society of
its own, and, on the title page of the Epistola, Camerarius identified himself as a member
of the “Kaiserlichen Academy (Nuremberg: Academieae Caesareo Leopold[ina] N[aturae]
C[uriosorum]).” Altdorf, where Sturm was on the faculty, is a suburb of Nuremburg, and
Sturm was a member of the Nuremberg Academy.^40
Although Camerarius cited Sturm along with Grew and Ray in the Epistola, he was
somewhat equivocal about Sturm’s contribution to the sexual theory:

Since I anticipate going beyond them, I think it is worth taking the trouble to recall

the reasons adduced, both my own and those of others, and in first place those that

the famous Englishmen Nehemiah Grew and John Ray furnish in abundance, seeing

that I have up to the present not become aware of any other authors or partisans of the

affirmative case, unless it may be that which I glimpse in [the writings of ] J. C. Sturm.

In other words, Sturm’s support for the sexual theory was something that Camerarius
thinks he may have “glimpsed” in Sturm’s papers. Based on a reading of Mark Elvin’s timely
translations of these papers,^41 it is difficult to see anything that might be construed as antici-
pating the two- sex model of plants. While Sturm does state that conception in animals and
plants are “exactly the same,” he omits any mention of the role of pollen in plants. Quite the
contrary, Sturm invokes the classical trope of the fertilizing spring breeze by stating that fer-
tilization in plants occurs in the soil in response to an “animating breeze of flowers.”^42 Sturm’s
idea of “fecundation” in the soil by an “animating breeze” is based on the notion that seeds are
produced with their embryos already inside them. Sturm believed that fertilization in plants
consisted of the activation of a pre- existing embryo after the seed had fallen to the ground.
This school of thought is known as Preformationism, and it played an important part in the
debate over sex in plants during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Preformationism: Ovists Versus Spermists

Preformationism can be traced as far back as Genesis and the writings of Aristotle, but was
first articulated as a scientific theory in the late seventeenth century by the French priest