308 i Flora Unveiled
Roger Bacon, an English Franciscan Friar and early proponent of empirical research,
argued that logic alone could never be as persuasive as a physical demonstration. As
Bacon pointed out, being told that fire is hot and burns flesh is only an abstraction until
we have actually experienced the heat of the flame ourselves. Bacon was a devoutly reli-
gious man who believed that experimental science would ultimately demonstrate the
truth of Christianity and thus serve the best interests of the Church. He was one of
the so- called scholastics or “schoolmen” who subscribed to the theology of medieval
European universities, which sought to reconcile Aristotelian logic with the writings of
the early Church Fathers. But he was also a visionary who understood the limitations of
De Plantis and foresaw that a new science of plants would be required for the improve-
ment of agriculture:
Now this science [agriculture] extends to the perfect study of all vegetables, the
knowledge of which is imperfectly delivered in Aristotle’s treatise De Plantis;^47 and
therefore a special and sufficient science of plants is required, which should be taught
in books on agriculture.^48It is unfortunate that Bacon did not have access to the two major treatises by Theophrastus,
Historia Plantarum and De Causis Plantaraum, and instead had to make do with the totally
inadequate De Plantis. Sometime between 1236 and 1247, he delivered a series of lectures at
the University of Paris based entirely on the questions addressed in De Plantis: whether
plants were alive, had souls, slept, breathed, and whether they could be transformed into
one another and be mutually grafted. Much space was devoted to the question of whether a
grafted tree had one soul or two. If it had one soul, which was it: the scion’s or the stock’s?
Such unanswerable questions Bacon doubtless would have dismissed as superfluous had he
been able to read Theophrastus’s treatises.^49
Another thirteenth- century scholastic theologian whose botanical enquiries would have
benefited greatly from a knowledge of Theophrastus was Albert of Bollstädt, better known
as Albertus Magnus, the esteemed Bishop of Ratisbon and mentor of the “Angelic Doctor,”
Thomas Aquinas. Like Bacon, Albert revered De Plantis as the work of Aristotle but was
keenly aware of its deficiencies, which he blamed entirely on corruptions introduced by
translators.
In his seven- volume treatise De Vegetabilibus, Albert provided elaborate interpreta-
tions of De Plantis to remedy these deficiencies and, unlike Bacon’s Paris lectures, Albert’s
interpretations in De Vegetabilibus were based on a significant body of his own original
observations.^50 Many of his interpolations demonstrate a remarkable talent for plant mor-
phology, which, in Agnes Arber’s estimation, was “unsurpassed during the next four hun-
dred years.” ^51
Of relevance to the problem of sex in plants is the chapter titled “On the Nature and
Generation of Flowers,” although his understanding of the structure and function of
flowers does not go much further than De Plantis. The flower, Albert states, “is the sign
of the fruit,” and the flower and fruit are of “the same substance.” Then, in Book VI, he
describes the stamens of several species, including their pollen. Although Pliny was the
first to describe and name stamens, he failed to note the presence of pollen inside the
anthers. Twelve hundred years later, Albert described the pollen grains in the anthers
but failed to associate them with the fecundating “dust” of male date palms. Instead, he