SEED STRUCTURE 49 



standpoint, according to the modern sense of the terms. In 

 botanical language, the meaning of the word anatomy has 

 become restricted since Grew's time, until it is now often used to 

 denote microscopic detail alone. Grew devotes a good deal of 

 space to the study of seed structure, dealing chiefly with such 

 features as can be observed with the naked eye (PI. 5). He 

 invented the term "radicle" for the embryonic root, and used the 

 word " plume " for the organ which we now speak of in the dimin- 

 utive as the plumule. The cotyledons he called " lobes," but he 

 recognised that they might in some cases appear above ground 

 and turn green, becoming in his terminology " dissimilar leaves." 

 He took the Bean seed as his principal type, and described it 

 with the lucid picturesqueness which is so characteristic of his 

 writing. It is, he says 1 , " cloathed with a double Vest or Coat : 

 These Coats, while the Bean is yet green are separable and 

 easily distinguished. When 'tis dry, they cleave so closely 

 together, that the Eye, not before instructed, will judge them 

 but one; the inner Coat likewise (which is of the most rare 

 contexture) so far shrinking up, as to seem only the roughness 

 of the outer, somewhat resembling Wafers under Maquaroons. 

 At the thicker end of the Bean, in the outer Coat, a very small 

 Foramen presents it self :... That this Foramen is truly permeable 

 even in old setting Beans, appears upon their being soak'd for 

 some time in Water : For then taking them out, and crushing 

 them a little, many small Bubbles will alternately rise and break 

 upon it."... The Plume "is not, like the Radicle, an entire Body, 

 but divided at its loose end into divers pieces, all very close set 

 together, as Feathers in a Bunch ; for which reason it may be 

 called the Plume. They are so close, that only two or three 

 of the outmost are at first seen : but upon a nice and curious 

 separation of these, the more interiour still may be discovered.... 

 In a French Bean the two outmost are very fair and elegant. 

 In the great Garden-Bean, two extraordinary small Plumes, 

 often, if not always, stand one on either side the great one now 

 describ'd." These two "extraordinary small plumes' 1 are, in 

 other words, the structures which we should now describe as 

 buds in the axils of the cotyledons. Grew also notices that two 



1 The order of the paragraphs cited is slightly altered from that of the original. 

 O. B. 4 



