LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 29 I 



universal name for this hitherto really nameless thing. Where, as 

 in the water lilies and in some others, it is rather large and conspicu- 

 ous within the flower, he applies to it that already much and 

 variously used term capitulum; but in the more numerous cases of 

 smaller flowers, where it appears as only a small protuberance in the 

 bottom of the blossom, he writes of it as the tuberculum. The 

 ovary, then, like the pollen, is one of Cordus' discoveries, so to 

 speak, in anthology. Furthermore, this tuberculum, as he calls it, 

 is openly recognized as an integral part of the flower as a whole. 

 The proof that he so received it is found in the language he em- 

 ploys in describing the paeonia. Having given the characteristics 

 of the flower leaves, he passes from these to the two large ovaries 

 occupying the center. These he calls a pair of horns, cornicula, 

 mentioning that they are hedged about by the yellow stamens, then 

 proceeding to state that these two cornicula ' ' remain after the other 

 parts of the flower have fallen, " then grow to be an inch and a half 

 long, 1 etc., etc. The idea that corolla, stamen, and pistils collectively 

 constitute a flower could not be expressed more unmistakably; 

 and it is the earliest record I have met with of such a proposition. 

 Theophrastus, as we have seen, first classified flowers as leafy and 

 capillary, so that a mere tuft of stamens only, unattended by leaves 

 of any kind, was a flower. Then, with a wild rose blossom before 

 him he construed the yellow stamens as being, not a circle of floral 

 organs, but a capillary flower within a leafy one. Thus the rose had 

 two flowers; the very central axis, globosely enlarged below, was 

 the ' ' fruit " even then , and no part of the flower. This Theophrastan 

 anthology of two flowers in one, rather than one flower made up of 

 two sets of organs, was everywhere accepted in Cordus' time. 

 Tragus had reproduced it, though with augmentations, even to call- 

 ing the petals "rose leaves," and the stamens the "rose flower." 2 

 Now in Cordus' procedure we have an illustration of how the making 

 of one little distinction, and the invention of a word that accentuates 

 that distinction, may revolutionize a science. The man had seen 

 an inaccuracy in the practice of calling by the one name of fruit both 

 the little tubercle lying at the bottom of a cherry blossom and the 

 subsequent ripe cherry. That mere floral sign and promise of a 

 fruit he determined to name a tubercle. Logically a fruit is no part 

 of any flower; as logically this "tubercle" is a part of it. In rose 

 and paeony there are not three flowers one within another, but one 

 flower made up of three different kinds of parts. We shall not be 



Hw*. PL, p. 135 . 



2 Tragus, Stirp. Comm., p. 988. 



