A Philosophy of the Insect by Jean-Marc Drouin & Anne Trager

Author:Jean-Marc Drouin & Anne Trager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2019-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

POLLINATION: A SECRET OF NATURE?

The Greeks, who probably inherited such techniques from the Babylonians, already knew that when cultivating date palms, to ensure a good harvest of dates, one needs to shake male flowers over female, fruit-bearing inflorescences.

This could lead one to believe that although the ancients may not have understood the mechanism, they at least admit the principle of sexual reproduction of plants. In fact, to know that there are two forms within a species, one of which is obviously fertile, but the other of which is also required for the production of an offspring, does not automatically lead to a distinction between the two sexes. In this case, a consultation with Theophrastus’s Enquiry Into Plants reveals that the Greek naturalist knows about artificial fertilization of the date palms, but we are unable to say that he knows about the sexual reproduction of the plants.38 To grant sexuality to plants is to conceive of sexual reproduction not as a specific case but as a phenomenon that concerns all plants. Such knowledge does not assert itself until the end of the seventeenth century. We owe the first experimental verification of the sexuality of flowers to Rudolf Jacob Camerer, known as Camerarius, a professor of medicine and director of the Botanical Garden of Tübingen, who in 1694 reports on it in a letter with the explicit title of De sexu plantarum epistola (Letter on the sex of plants).39 At the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, Sébastien Vaillant enthusiastically supports this idea. Linnaeus does the same in his 1729 thesis entitled Praeludia sponsaliarum plantarum (Preludes to plant weddings).40 There, the Swedish botanist explains the function of the different parts of the flower. Plant sexuality seems to him so spectacular that he does not hesitate to use it as a basis for his classification of plants.41

Once the need for fertilization has been admitted, it remains to be determined how the approximation of the sexes can take place or, in other words, how the male element, the pollen, contained in the stamens, can be brought into contact with the female element, the pistil. This contact is essential in plants with separate sexes, that is to say, in species that have flowers with stamens and others with pistils. It is also common in species whose flowers have both stamens and pistils, but which, by having their pollen carried on the pistil of another plant, avoid self-fertilization.

The first experiments focus on species with separate sexes and pollen transported by the wind. This was the case of the Mercurialis annua used by Camerarius. Observations of insect transport come later.

Arthur Dobbs, governor of North Carolina, is one of the first, when he was living in Ireland. There, future among other “rural amusements,” he devotes himself to observing bees. From these observations he draws the substance of a letter to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1750). He explains that he follows in the footsteps of Réaumur’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes, but that,

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