246 i Flora Unveiled
is the cause of plants under a certain disposition of circumstances; for in the case
of an animal when the sexes mingle the powers of the sexes mingle after they have
been separated, and a single offspring is produced from them both. But this is not
the case with plants ... in plants the only operation which we find is the generation
of fruits.Nowhere in the discussion of the two sexes are flowers specifically referred to. According
to the Syriac translation of De Plantis, which is earlier than the Latin and Greek transla-
tions, “flowers” are comparable to the “hair and feathers” of animals, thus reinforcing the
impression that Nicolaus did not consider the flower (i.e., the corolla) to be a reproductive
structure.^36
How could the two sexes of plants “mingle” without copulating? To explain the apparent
lack of copulation in plants, the Syriac version of De Plantis includes the bold assertion that
the penis of plants is the flower stalk, or pedicel, and the immature fruit, or carpel, serves as
the plant uterus. In other words, the male and female organs of plants are joined one on top
of the other in a state of permanent coitus:
In plants there exists something similar to a uterus and a penis joined together,
viz. the forms called moschoi. A moschos is a stalk by which leaves or fruit are
suspended. In this the conjunction of the two capacities resides, and there
is the generative capacity acting upon that which is generated. Seeds resem-
ble eggs, because in them the active and the passive capacities begin to move
together.^37This was a logical inference, which neatly solved the apparent paradox that, like birds,
plants need two sexes to reproduce but, unlike birds, are unable to move in order to
copulate. On this basis, there would be no reason to suspect stamens as the male sexual
structures because they are physically separated from the carpel. The pedicel- as- penis
hypothesis, which has been overlooked by historians of botany, deserves to be recognized
as the earliest known anatomical hypothesis for the male sexual structure of hermaph-
roditic flowers. It appears to be present only in the Syriac translation of De Plantis.^38
This raises the possibility that the hypothesis was introduced by the Syriac translator
but dropped by subsequent translators, perhaps on aesthetic or moral grounds. As we
shall see later in the book, the stamens- as- penis hypothesis, when proposed by the British
physician Nehemiah Grew in 1684, was rejected by many contemporary naturalists on
moral grounds. Perhaps the pedicel- as- penis analogy in the Syriac version of De Plantis
was similarly received.
Apart from the anomalous Syriac translation that was not generally available in the
Middle Ages, Nicolaus’s De Plantis provides no new insights into the question of plant sex,
and its truncated and corrupted presentations of Aristotle’s writings on the subject only
succeed in muddying the waters. We are left with a paraphrase of Empedocles’s oft- cited
bird’s egg metaphor: “the hen lays the egg ... so too with the plant.” This was the sum total
of knowledge about plant reproduction that was available to scholars of the Middle Ages
from the Greco- Roman philosophers.