290 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



"stamina. " This is apparent in the account which he gives of thal- 

 ictrum flowers. He says they are "very small, and consist of pen- 

 dulous stamens only; but after the falling away of these, very small 

 oblong black seeds remain. MI In the case of larger flowers, where 

 the stamens are fewer and easily counted, it becomes clear that by 

 "stamen" Cordus means primarily the filament; this doubtless 

 partly because in very many instances it was all he could find. There 

 are no "apices" to the inner "stamina" of pulsatilla or clematis; 

 none to the forked styles of the many cichoriaceae and compositae 

 which he examined, and he always calls these the stamina. Even 

 in the solanum type of floral structure, where five stamens, almost 

 all anther, form a central column forth from whose summit one 

 slender style-thread protrudes, Cordus, seeing them all, denomin- 

 ated all six indiscriminately "stamina." 2 Evidently his mind was 

 exercised by these small things, in the morphology of which he saw 

 enough to prevent him at least from calling them indiscriminately 

 stamina and apices as others of his time were doing. In the large and 

 therefore convenient flowers of lilies he saw and took note of the 

 transverse position of the anthers, but would not name the things 

 by any name at all. The stalks which these rested on were what he 

 called stamina. The term apex he seems to have wished to trans- 

 fer to the style and stigma and to have it apply to that part of the 

 flower only. 3 He takes particular notice of dust rubiginosus 

 pulviusculus which the lily anthers shed before collapsing. Again 

 in describing the anthers of Paris he sees this same kind of dust, and 

 there proceeds to assign it a name; even the name which it has 

 always since borne; for he describes these parts as being "luteo 

 polline conspersa. " 4 



Since the most ancient times what they knew as a fruit they had 

 recognized in its germinal state resting at the bottom of the flower 

 or else below it ; but in every stage from the tender germinal condi- 

 tion forward to its maturity they had called it the "fruit" simply. 

 Cordus makes the first inroad upon this time-honored usage. 

 That which we know as the ovary he uniformly declines to write of 

 as the fruit; as if perceiving an absurdity in making this small 

 and tender mere promise of fruit, identical with the future actual 

 fruit, even in name. He does not, however, formally propose a 



' Hist. PI., p. 97 3 . 

 * Ibid., p. 90*. 



i Ibid., p. i39 2 . Also in the flower of Paris, p. 152, he calls the stigmas, 

 not the anthers, apices. 

 4 Ibid., p. 152. 



