LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 289 



Similarly he describes the corolla of Datura as being laid in folds 

 before expansion. 1 It will not be assumed that in first writing these 

 things down he had any thought of their important bearing upon 

 affinities. He may have had; but whether so or no the terms he 

 chose are so perfectly correct for the kinds of prefloration which they 

 indicate, that no reformer of terminology has sought to displace 

 them, and they remain in common use to-day. 



The word petal was still unheard and unwritten in our science. It 

 will be proposed by an Italian botanist two generations later. It is 

 evident Cordus has realized to some degree the desirability of some 

 term by which flower leaves shall be distinguished from ordinary 

 foliage; for where flowers are choripetalous he uses the diminutive 

 foliolum (leaflet) instead of folium ; this, however, not as an inviolable 

 rule, nor in such wise as to preclude the application of the term to 

 ordinary green leaves that are of very small size. Also such 

 elongated and more or less strap-shaped flower leaves as radiately 

 encircle the middle of a flower, or head of flowers, Cordus repeatedly 

 describes as resembling rays, "radii"; the earliest adumbration of 

 the term now long in use for this kind of corolla. 



The disk-corollas in the composites that have rays were still 

 undiscovered. They were seen in the mass only and were always 

 written of as the "stamina," therefore quite undistinguished from 

 the central parts of a buttercup or anemone blossom. Cordus alone 

 I find in one instance so writing of the "stamina" of one particular 

 composite as to prove that he had seen the individual "stamen" 

 as he could have called it, and had found its form peculiar. The 

 plant is Tussilago; and having described the rays, he says that the 

 stamina in the midst of them are "in form like minute lilies." 2 

 No matter what he calls the thing, it is plain that he is the dis- 

 coverer of the disk-corolla in composites. 



If both stamens and pistils are numerous, small, and slender 

 in the same flower Cordus makes no distinction between them in 

 name. In this case all are "stamina"; thus in Pulsatilla all the 

 threads in the midst of the flower are stamina ; but those occupying 

 the very center he observes as ' ' changing into a tuft of long hairs at 

 the base of each of which there is a seed as in clematis. " If, how- 

 ever, in flowers at once many-stamened and many-pistilled the pis- 

 tils, being without styles, have no capillary aspect in the aggregate, 

 then the two sets are not confused and the inner ones are not 



1 Hist. PL, p. 90. 



2 Ibid., p. 93. 

 * Ibid., p. 121. 



