356 i Flora Unveiled
It is tempting to interpret such passages as tongue- in- cheek theatrics, designed to shock
the prudish and showcase Vaillant’s rhetorical virtuosity. However, since nowhere in his
lecture does Vaillant admit to any embellishment of his risqué descriptions of pollination
or acknowledge that they are figures of speech, it is difficult to know where he himself drew
the line between fact and fancy and to what extent he believed that plants were subject to
the same passions as humans.
But these delightful and provocative revelations were not the only frissons of excitement
administered to the audience in Vaillant’s famous lecture. Even more scandalously, he went
on to accuse his well- connected younger colleague, Claude- Joseph Geoffroy, of having
stolen his, Vaillant’s, work, as well as having plagiarized key results from other unnamed
sources in the lecture Geoffroy had presented on the same topic six years earlier.
Altogether, it was an unforgettable occasion. Indeed, the students were so enamored
with Valliant’s lecture that they clamored for him to take over the course after the regu-
lar professor, Antoine de Jussieu, returned from his travels—a request to which de Jussieu
reluctantly acceded.
Sex, Thievery, and Priority at the Jardin du RoiWhen Julius von Sachs wrote that some proponents of the sexual theory of plants “sought
to appropriate to themselves the merit of the true discoverer” of sex in plants, he was
almost certainly referring to the case of Claude- Joseph Geoffroy. In his lecture of 1711,
“Observations on the Structure and Uses of the Principal Parts of Flowers,” Geoffroy broke
with the asexualist views of his former mentor, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, and embraced
the new sexual theory of plants. In support of his position, he claimed to have carried out
several observations and experiments— tassel removal in maize and isolation experiments
with female Mercurialis plants— that demonstrated the necessity of pollination for seed
production. As we saw in Chapter 12, both of these experiments had already been described
in Camerarius’s Epistola.
In the wake of his lecture, Geoffroy was immediately hailed by his Academy colleagues
for having provided the first experimental proof of the sexual theory of plants. Sébastien
Vaillant’s accusation of plagiarism in his lecture six years later was a shot across the bow.
First, he compared Geoffroy to the nymph Echo for appropriating certain terms to which
Vaillant laid claim. This was not a credible charge because the terms in question can be
traced back to classical times. However, Vaillant’s second grenade, tossed off almost as an
afterthought, hit closer to home:
I return to the different sexes of plants... I thought it convenient to establish three
types of flowers: Males, Females and Androgynes, names that a sweet and officious
Echo (The Author of the Observations on the Structure and Uses of the Main Parts of
Flowers) cared to repeat (at least the first two) in front of a Royal Assembly in order
to transmit them to posterity, as well as some details which he did not report so faith-
fully, since he believed them to be simply a case of the fabled crow dressing itself up
with the feathers of a jay. But as it would displease God if I were to take away from
him these details and envy even the smallest of the beautiful facts he gleaned here