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Among the plaintiffs and defendants were Descartes, Leibniz, Hooke, Halley, Newton,
and Pascal.^22 The acrimonious exchanges between Geoffroy and Vaillant are thus symp-
tomatic of the lax rules governing citation and intellectual property during the eighteenth
centur y.Early Plant Hybridizers: Mather, Fairchild, and Miller
In 1627, Francis Bacon stated what seemed obvious at the time: since plants didn’t copu-
late with one another, they could never produce “mixture in kinds.” Copulation, he stated,
arises from lust, and “lust requireth a voluntary motion.” Conversely, if plants could copu-
late with one another, it followed logically that they would also be capable of lust and volun-
tary motion. Seen from this perspective, Vaillant’s torrid description of the sexual foreplay
of flowers was no mere conceit, but a straightforward application of Baconian logic.
Once sex was demonstrated in plants, the next step was to determine whether, contra
Bacon, they were also capable of producing hybrid plants. The discovery of plant hybrids
would complement Camerarius’s demonstration of the requirement of pollen for seed pro-
duction and provide definitive proof of sexual reproduction in plants. In this section, we
focus on the work of four individuals whose casual observations and early experiments laid
the foundation for future scientific studies of plant hybridization: Cotton Mather, Thomas
Fairchild, Richard Bradley, and Philip Miller.Cotton Mather and Bicolored Maize
The earliest known report of plant hybridization was Cotton Mather’s observation of bicol-
ored maize cobs in 1716, in a field “not far from the city of Boston.”^23 Cotton Mather was
a Harvard- educated Congregationalist minister, scholar, and prolific writer who took over
as pastor of Boston’s North Church after the death of his father, Increase Mather. A prey to
superstition, Mather’s zealous participation in the infamous witch trials of 1692 and 1693 in
Salem, Massachusetts is a permanent stain on his reputation that has overshadowed his sci-
entific activities. These trials, which he never repudiated, resulted in the execution of twenty
people, mostly women. Still, he did take a rational interest in scientific questions pertaining
to botany and medicine. As an example of his forays into public health, he and a physi-
cian friend led a campaign to inoculate Bostonians against smallpox, which had reached
epidemic proportions by 1713. Their efforts met furious resistance from the citizenry, who
regarded inoculation as unnatural and ungodly.
Like Camerarius, Cotton Mather was an ardent admirer of Robert Boyle. In 1710, he
received an honorary doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, and, in 1713, he was
elected to the Royal Society. He was aware of Grew’s sexual theory, and he corresponded
regularly with European scientists. A letter Mather wrote in 1716 to fellow Royal Society
member James Petiver appears to be the earliest surviving account of plant hybridization.
In the letter, Mather describes two “experiments” performed by an unnamed friend “not far
from the City of Boston.” The first was with maize:[M] y Friend planted a Row of Indian Corn that was Coloured Red and Blue; the rest
of the Field being planted with corn of the yellow, which is the most usual colour. To