204 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. $4 



employment of the term in an untechnical sense, that is, as de- 

 signating some other organ that happens to be shaped like a cup; 

 thus we find him calling the lily flower a calyx, 1 i.e., a chalice-shaped 

 flower. 



His doctrine of the flower in general is that of Theophrastus hardly 

 improved upon. There are two kinds, the leafy and the capillary; 

 but both are united in, for example, the rose. The term petal is still 

 wanting in botany. Its introduction into the vocabulary will not 

 be proposed until two generations after Fuchsius. The foliar parts 

 of a flower are still leaves only. Yet what is curiously interesting 

 is, that already as the green leaf is seen to have usually that which 

 they have called its petiolus, or pediculus, so the flower leaf is 

 credited with having its unguis, or claw; the more or less narrowed 

 basal part by which it is attached to its receptacle. Fuchsius 

 defines well enough this unguis, even remarking that in the flower 

 of a red rose this claw is white. And so the distinguishing of the 

 two parts, blade and claw, in this organ historically antedates the 

 naming of the whole organ as petal; and Fuchsius, so far from 

 affirming this to be a new distinction of his own making freely 

 attributes it to "the ancients." 



In this Fuchsian vocabulary occurs what is perhaps the earliest 

 botanical definition of stamens. There is so much of history in it 

 that one must reproduce it as literally as may be. " Stamens are 

 those apexes that come forth from the middle of a flower-cup ; and are 

 so called because they rise up like filaments out of the inmost bosom 

 of the flower." As a definition this is illogical and bungling; 

 for both the anthers and the filaments are separately called the 

 stamens; not by any means the two parts that go to the making 

 up of stamens ; either one alone is stamen according to his absurd 

 statement. In the first clause the anthers, apices, are the stamens; 

 in the second, the filaments are the stamens. That what he de- 

 nominates apices are the anthers is clear as day from his description 

 of the flower of the common white lily, where he remarks that in 

 this the apices are yellow ; for no other parts of the lily blossom 

 are yellow but the anthers. 3 The term filamenta by its very mean- 

 ing applies to no other organs but the filaments and styles. Let 

 us note here that there is yet no description of a stamen. The author 

 neither thinks nor speaks of the thing but in the plural. What he 



> Hist. Stirp., p. 363. 



2 " Stamina sunt qui in medio calycis erumpunt apices; sic dicta, quod 

 veluti filamenta ab intimo floris sinu prosiliant." Fuchs, in the vocabulary. 

 J Hist. Stirp., p. 363. 



