burst and allowed the contents to escape. But he explained
the pollen-tube, which he had thus seen, incorrectly by supposing that these projections were intended to prevent the
bursting of moistened grains. It was not till sixty or seventy
years later that the matter was fully understood. Koelreuter
supposed the contents of the pollen-grain to be a 'cellular
tissue,' and the true fertilising substance to be the oil which
adheres to the outside of the grains, but is formed inside them
and finds its way out through fine passages in the coat. The
bursting of the pollen-grains, which his opponent Gleichen
thought must take place to allow of the escape of his supposed
spermatozoids, seemed to him an unnatural proceeding.
Starting from the hypothesis, that the oil which clings to the pollen-grains is the fertilising substance, Koelreuter propounds his view of the process of fertilisation in accordance with the chemical notions of the day; he first rejects the idea that the pollen-grains themselves can reach the ovary, and then says: 'Both the male seed and the female moisture on the stigmas are of an oily nature, and therefore when they come together enter into a most intimate union with one another, and form a substance which, if fertilisation is to ensue, must be absorbed by the stigma and conveyed through the style to the so-called ovules or unfertilised germs.' Koelreuter therefore made the fertilisation really take place on the stigma, the mingled male and female substance making its way into the ovary and there producing the embryos in the seed. He had expressed this view before in 1761; he repeated it in 1763 with the idea that the male and female moistures unite together, as an acid and an alkali unite to form a neutral salt; a new living organism is the result at once or later of this union. In an investigation which he made in 1775 into the conditions of pollination in Asclepiadeae he reverted to this idea, and insisted that the act of fertilisation in the whole vegetable and animal kingdom is a mingling of two fluids. But at a later period he seems to have no longer considered the moisture
