Flora Unveiled

From Empedocles to Theophrastus j 217

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which can move about, the sexes are separated, one individual being male and one

female, though both are the same species, as with human and horse. But in plants

these powers are mingled, female not being separated from male. Wherefore they gen-

erate out of themselves, and do not emit semen but produce an embryo, what is called

the seed. Empedocles puts this well in the line: “ ‘at first tall trees lay olive eggs.”‘ For

as the egg is an embryo, a certain part of it giving rise to the animal and the rest being

nutriment, so also from part of the seed springs the growing plant, and the rest is

nutriment for the shoot and the first root.^20

In this passage, Aristotle seems to come close to the idea of hermaphrodism in plants.

Echoing Empedocles’s doctrine that plants were formed prior to the differentiation of male

and female in nature, he makes the startling argument that a plant can be compared to a

pair of animals in the act of copulation:

In a certain sense the same thing happens also in those animals which have the sexes

separate. For when there is need for them to generate the sexes are no longer separated

any more than in plants, and their nature desiring that they copulate and are united,

that one animal is made out of both.^21

The analogy of plants to copulating animals derives from Empedocles’s concep-

tion of animal evolution by the random assemblage or copulation of free- living body

parts. The image also evokes the passage in Plato’s Symposium about the divine

hermaphrodites:

In all this Nature acts like an intelligent workman. For to the essence of plants belongs

no other function or business than the production of seed; since, then, this is brought

about by the union of male and female, Nature has mixed these and set them together

in plants, so that the sexes are not divided in them.^22

By suggesting that plants are like copulating animals, Aristotle solved the problem of

the universality of sex, but he also introduced a logical problem because it implied that the

original plants were divided into two sexes, which subsequently fused by copulation. Such

animal- like behavior would be inconsistent with the immobility of plants and their lowly

place on the Scala Natura.

Later, in De Generatione Animalium, Aristotle backs away from the idea that plants con-

tain both sexes. He begins by contrasting the female’s contribution to the growing embryo

versus that of the male. The female provides the “material” out of which the embryo is con-

structed, and the male supplies the organism’s essence or “soul”:

The female always provides the material, the male, that which fashions it, for this is

the power that we say they each possess, and this is what is meant by calling them male

and female. Thus while it is necessary for the female to provide a body and a material

mass, it is not necessary for the male, because it is not within the work of art or the

embryo that the tools or the maker must exist. While the body is from the female, it

is the soul that is from the male.^23