Camerarius, Rudolph Jacob

Camerarius, Rudolph Jacob (kămərâr`ēəs, Ger. r`dôlf yä`kôp kämərä`rēs), 1665–1721, German botanist and physician. The first to present a clear and definite picture of sex in plants, Camerarius based his conclusions on careful experiments and observations. He described the stamen as the male organ and the ovary as the female organ and emphasized their relationship to the formation of seeds. He became a professor at the Univ. of Tübingen in 1688.

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Camerarius, Rudolph Jacob 

Born Feb. 12, 1665, in Tübingen; died there Sept. 11, 1721. German botanist; professor and director of the botanical gardens at the University of Tübingen (1688).

Camerarius was the first to demonstrate the existence of male and female sexes in plants. He showed that seeds do not develop when the female plants (mulberry and hepática) are isolated from the male plants and when the staminate flowers (corn and hemp) or the anthers (castor-oil plant) are removed. Comparing the sexual parts of plants and animals, Camerarius identified the stamens as the male sexual organs and the pistils as the female sexual organs. He also identified the pollen in the stamens as the source of fertilization.

WORKS

De sexu plantarum epistola. Tübingen, 1694.
In Russian translation:
“O pole u rastenii.” In I. Kel’reiter, Uchenie o pole i gibridizatsii rastenii. Moscow-Leningrad, 1940.