236 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



may have done, being both minute and hidden away within the 

 partly closed hollow of the corolla at its base, falling away with it; 

 but the style is very obvious, and in describing this hollow bell 

 of a corolla he says: " It has in the middle a red-brown something 

 like the clapper of a bell, which, after the falling of the flower 

 grows into a round reddish berry. ' ' l The Latin term used for this 

 thing in the middle of the flower bell is pist ilium. It is the first 

 instance of the employment of that term to designate what has 

 long since become universally known by that name. 



On the whole, then, as by suggesting the classifying of corollas 

 this author is the first herald of Tournefort ; much more conspicu- 

 ously as the first investigator, even fairly the discoverer, of stamen 

 and pistil, is he the first forerunner of Linnaeus. It was anthology 

 which created the new botany of the eighteenth century and the 

 nineteenth; and the beginnings of the modern anthology are with 

 Tragus. 



Fruit and Seed. Well in advance of classic antiquity in the 

 knowledge of floral structure, Tragus not only added nothing to 

 carpology, but had never learned either from Theophrastus or by 

 research of his own anything like all that Theophrastus had attained 

 to along this line. One may doubt if any other book was ever 

 printed, or even written in any age, in which there find expression 

 so many whimsical and superstitious fancies about seeds. In a 

 general way they seem to fall short of having that value in the 

 economy of plant life and plant distribution, in Tragus' opinion, 

 which even a remote antiquity accorded to them. The transmuta- 

 tion of the seeds of cereals into germs of chess and darnel he accepts 

 without the expression of a doubt. Abiogenesis, the doctrine of 

 the origin of living things from lifeless matter, he accepts un- 

 waveringly, and with a plenitude of faith probably surpassing that 

 of the Greeks who aforetime invented the theory. He even defends 

 it by theologic arguments 2 ; and by it he explains the coming into 

 existence not only of low and simple flowerless things, but also of 

 some of the highest types, even of trees. The time seems to have 

 been when he had thought that all willows had at first come forth 

 spontaneously from the mud of river banks ; for he knew them to be 

 propagated by cuttings always, and no one had ever seen or heard of 

 a willow seed. Even when with such truly scientific inquisitiveness 

 he had planted some of the " white down" that he had gathered as it 

 was about to float off from a willow, and had afterwards the satisfac- 



i Stirp. Comm., p. 974. 

 Ibid., pp. 1125, 1126. 



