358 i Flora Unveiled
lecture. Among the passages that he found particularly objectionable was the salacious
description of stamens that have explosively discharged their pollen and “find themselves
so exhausted that at the very moment of giving life they bring upon themselves a sudden
death”:
One needs Mr. Vaillant’s imagination to bring such a tale to its conclusion. It is a free-
wheeling description of a pleasure that he brings to his poetic style, not as a modest
exposition as would be appropriate to a philosopher. Because at the end of the day, all
this Apollonian^20 nonsense means nothing except that flower dust which is the sub-
ject here, carries a fecundity that renders the seed capable of perpetuating the species.Such overheated language, Geoffroy asserts, is totally incompatible with scientific
discourse:
I am not saying that a Philosopher should not observe all and describe all, as long as
it is done truthfully and in good taste. But it seems to me worthy of blame to concoct
romanticized descriptions in which one ridiculously takes pleasure with subjects one
should never represent except with a great deal of restraint and always in a serious
manner. Must one endure it when a learned dissertation is given with such ill- timed
badinage, and when a botanist, carried away by his imagination, uses words belonging
to the loosest gallantry and gives obscene depictions for any purpose?Claude- Joseph Geoffroy may have been guilty of plagiarizing Camerarius, but he makes
a valid case for sobriety in scientific discourse. Nevertheless, the whole experience had
left Geoffroy badly traumatized. The following year, he abandoned his work on the sex-
ual theory, and, in 1715, he seized the opportunity to switch departments from Botany to
Chemistry. Thereafter, he published papers on chemical and pharmacological topics only.
Precisely when Geoffroy’s colleagues first became aware that there was any truth in
Vaillant’s charges is difficult to say. By 1728, the French botanist Henri Louis du Hamel was
citing Camerarius’s du Sexe des Plantes, along with the papers of Geoffroy and Vaillant. The
first person to revive the controversy directly was Johann Georg Gmelin of the University of
Tübingen, who, in 1749, republished Rudolph Jacob Camerarius’s 1694 De Sexu Plantarum
Epistola. In his commentary, Gmelin noted the striking resemblance of sections of
Geoffroy’s 1711 lecture to passages in the Epistola published seventeen years earlier.
Judged by modern standards, the Geoffroy brothers were clearly remiss in failing to cite
both Camerarius and Morland, but the rules of attribution were more lax in the early eigh-
teenth century, and the newly formed scientific societies were often competing for scientific
priority over significant discoveries. Robert Merton describes the tense atmosphere that
existed in scientific circles during the early modern period because of the frequent charges
of plagiarism:
[I] t is quite in keeping with the practice of the time to charge, and be charged with,
plagiarism. Can you think of anyone of consequence in that energetic age who escaped
unscathed, either as victim or alleged perpetrator of literary or scientific theft, and
typically, as both filcher and filchee? I cannot.^21