Flora Unveiled

Roman and Greek Botany j 245

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say that both the male and female produce progeny, but they differ in their characteristics

according to gender.

Next, he considers the possibility that the two sexes are “mingled” in plants, a clear refer-

ence to Aristotle. He points out that, logically speaking, things can only be said to “mingle”

if they were once separated, and if, in plants the sexes are mingled, it ought to be possible to

find individuals at various intermediate stages of the mingling process. This, he states, one

never observes, so the two sexes cannot be “combined” in plants:

We ought also to enquire whether the two kinds are found in combination in plants,

for things which mingle together ought first to be simple and separate, and so the

male will be separate and the female separate; they afterwards mingle, and the min-

gling will only take place when it is produced by generation. A plant, therefore, would

have been discovered before the mingling had taken place, and it ought therefore to

be at the same time an active and a passive agent. The two sexes cannot be found com-

bined in any plant.

Indeed, Nicolas states, if individual plants were hermaphroditic, this would make them

“more perfect” than animals:

if this were so, a plant would be more perfect than an animal, because it would not

require anything outside itself in order to generate.

If plants do not reproduce by the copulating (“mingling”) of the two sexes— how do they

reproduce? Here, Nicolaus, like Aristotle and Theophrastus before him, invokes the old

metaphor of Empedocles comparing the fruit of an olive tree to a bird’s egg. The seed, like

the egg, contains the embryo within it, and supplies it with nourishment:

But we must suppose that the mingling of the male and the female in plants takes place

in some other way, because the seed of a plant resembles the embryo in animals, being

a mixture of the male and female elements. And just as in a single egg there exists the

force to generate the chicken and the material of its nutriment up to the time when

it reaches perfection and emerges from the egg, and the female lays the egg in a short

space of time; so too with the plant. And Empedocles is right when he said the tall trees

do not bear their young ; for that which is born can only be born from a portion of the

seed, and the rest of the seed becomes at first the nutriment of the root; and the plant

begins to move as soon as it is born.

To Nicolaus, the egg- like nature of seeds is proof enough (by analogy to birds) that two

sexes must be involved in the making of seeds by plants. However, since the only activity we

observe when plants produce seeds is the “generation of fruits,” sex may only play a role in

plant reproduction under certain “circumstances”:

This then is the opinion which we ought to hold about the mingling of the male

and female in plants, similar to that which we hold about animals. This process