In 1672, Grew* describes in the outer coat of the seeds of many Leguminous plants a small foramen, placed opposite to the radicle of the Embryo, which, he adds, is “not a hole casually made, or by the breaking off of the stalk,” but formed for purposes afterwards stated to be the aeration of the Embryo, and facilitating the passage of its radicle in germination.  It appears that he did not consider this foramen in the testa as always present, the functions which he ascribes to it being performed in cases where it is not found, either, according to him, by the hilum itself, or in hard fruits, by an aperture in the stone or shell.

(Footnote.  Anatomy of Veget. begun page 3.  Anatomy of Plants page 2.)

In another part of his work* he describes and figures, in the early state of the Ovulum, two coats, of which the outer is the testa; the other, his middle membrane, is evidently what I have termed nucleus, whose origin in the Ovulum of the Apricot he has distinctly represented and described.

(Footnote.  Anatomy of Plants page 210 table 80.)

Malpighi, in 1675,* gives the same account of the early state of the Ovulum; his secundinae externae being the testa, and his chorion the nucleus.  He has not, however, distinguished, though he appears to have seen, the foramen of Grew, from the fenestra and fenestella, and these, to which he assigns the same functions, are merely his terms for the hilum.

(Footnote.  Anatome Plant. page 75 et 80.)

In 1694, Camerarius, in his admirable essay on the sexes of plants,* proposes, as queries merely, various modes in which either the entire grains of pollen, or their particles after bursting, may be supposed to reach and act upon the unimpregnated Ovula, which he had himself carefully observed.  With his usual candour, however, he acknowledges his obligation on this subject to Malpighi, to whose more detailed account of them he refers.

(Footnote.  Rudolphi Jacobi Camerarii de sexu plantarum epistola page 8 46 et seq.)

Mr. Samuel Morland, in 1703,* in extending Leeuwenhoek’s hypothesis of generation to plants, assumes the existence of an aperture in the Ovulum, through which it is impregnated.  It appears, indeed, that he had not actually observed this aperture before fecundation, but inferred its existence generally and at that period, from having, as he says, “discovered in the seeds of beans, peas, and Phaseoli, just under one end of what we call the eye, a manifest perforation, which leads directly to the seminal plant,” and by which he supposes the Embryo to have entered.  This perforation is evidently the foramen discovered in the seeds of Leguminous plants by Grew, of whose observations respecting it he takes no notice, though he quotes him in another part of his subject.

(Footnote.  Philosophical Transactions volume 23 n. 287 page 1474.)