352 i Flora Unveiled
overall female interpretation of flowers, he compared nectaries to breasts, which nourish
the seed.
The most enduring contribution to botany of the influential and aristocratic Joseph
Pitton de Tournefort was the concept of genus.^3 In his Institutiones rei Herberai (170 0)
he defined twenty- two classes of flowering plants based primarily on the structure of the
corolla and 698 genera using the fruit as the main taxonomic criterion. Earlier, in 1694, he
had published his important three- volume treatise, Elements of Botany, which hewed closely
to Malpighi’s uterine model of the flower.
Tournefort’s opposition to the sexual theory arose from three main sources: his defer-
ence to Malpighi, his own research on spore production in the nonseed plants, and his fail-
ure to confirm the existence of sex in date palms experimentally. Tournefort believed that
the spores of ferns, bryophytes, and fungi were equivalent to the seeds of flowering plants,
and, because he had determined that such “seeds” (spores) were produced without any vis-
ible sexual structures, he inferred that they must have been produced asexually. If the seeds
(spores) of fungi were produced without sex, he reasoned that the seeds of angiosperms and
gymnosperms must also be produced asexually.
Although he rejected the sexual theory in principle, Tournefort recognized that, accord-
ing to the classical literature, pollen did seem to play a role in fruit development in date
palms, and he was also aware of the role of the fig wasp in the caprifig– edible fig inter-
action, but he adopted the views of Theophrastus regarding the asexual mechanism by
which this occurred (discussed in Chapter 8). Nevertheless, shortly after being appointed
Professor of Botany at the Royal Garden in 1683, he traveled to Andalusia, Spain, famous for
its date palm orchards, where he attempted to carry out artificial pollination experiments.
Unfortunately, the project ended in failure, for, according to Edward Lee Greene, “he made
unsuccessful efforts to either establish or disprove the reputation the palms had long had
with some botanists of being endowed with sexuality; but he came away knowing no more
about the matter than Theophrastus had known two thousand years before.”^4
Although Tournefort remained adamantly opposed to the sexual theory, two of his stu-
dents at the Jardins du Roi, Sébastien Vaillant and Claude- Joseph Geoffroy, made it the
primary focus of their research. Claude- Joseph Geoffroy’s older brother, Étienne- François
Geoffroy, in his 1704 medical thesis on spermism versus ovism, was actually the first to pres-
ent a lecture on Camerarius’s pollination studies (without citing Camerarius) to the French
Academy. Seven years later, Claude- Joseph presented a lecture to the Academy purport-
edly on his own research that was nearly identical to the experiments of Camerarius— once
again, without citing Camerarius.^5 This provoked Sébastien Vaillant, a former surgeon and
student of Tournefort’s, who was then working on a new system of plant classification based
on the sexual theory, to charge the younger Geoffroy with plagiarism in a sensational— and
notorious— public lecture.^6
Sébastien Vaillant and the “Innocent Pleasures” of PlantsOn the morning of June 10, 1717, at around 7 am, Sébastien Vaillant strode briskly into
the auditorium at the Jardin du Roi to deliver the opening lecture of the annual course in
botany with the deceptively dull title Discourse on the Structure of Flowers, Their Differences