Adam Zalužanský’s “De sexu plantarum” (1592): an early pioneering chapter on plant sexuality

Abstract

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.

Chemical Anniversaries of 2023 Associated with Charles University

“…Téhož roku se vrátil do Prahy a stal se profesorem pražské univerzity, kde přednášel klasické jazyky, zejména řečtinu -vyučovat medicínu nemohl, protože lékařská fakulta v té době v Praze neexistovala. Vedle toho se věnoval studiu přírodních věd a v roce 1592 vydává spis Metodi herbariae libri tres, ve kterém se jako první na světě věnuje sexualitě rostlin 9 . Spis vychází ze Zalužanského vlastních botanických experimentů prováděných ve sklenících, které pro něj dal na zámku Kratochvíle vybudovat Petr Vok z Rožmberka.…”

Plant Studies May Lead Us to Rethink the Concept of Behavior

“…A similar tacit assumption concerning sex, which was also considered to be inseparable from locomotion, together with a non-reflected belief in a fundamental difference between animals and the rest of the living world (traceable to Aristotle), has hampered acceptance of the idea that plants are sexual organisms. Many prominent scholars denied plant sexuality up to the beginning of the 19th century, long after its initial description by A. Zalužanský at the end of the 16th century and by the better known J. Camerarius a century later (see Žárský and Tupý, 1995 ; Funk, 2013 ). We suggest that similar non-reflected assumptions may contribute to the problem of defining behavior in a manner which would not severally restrict the field of phenomena observable in plants that can (and should) be studied from the behavioral perspective.…”