SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



likely to meet with any other one botanist in the whole history of 

 our science who so greatly advanced the morphology of the flower 

 as Valerius Cordus. To the finishing of morphologic anthology 

 only two things remained to be done. The calyx was to be added 

 to the category of floral organs, and the "flower leaves" awaited a 

 distinctive name; for the "foliolum" proposed and used by Cordus 

 did not satisfactorily meet the demand. It was not sufficiently 

 different from folium. The discovery of the functions of certain 

 floral parts, though of the very highest importance, awaited not the 

 coming of a more astute botanist, but the invention of mechanical 

 aids to natural vision. 



Among a number of Cordus' signal new discoveries in anthology, 

 one must not omit to mention the flowers of the genus Ficus. Every 

 botanical authority from Theophrastus forward had averred that 

 fig trees have no flowers, and that the fruits are only fruits and noth- 

 ing more from their first small appearing to their ripening. Cordus 

 says : ' ' When the figs are half grown they develop in their interior 

 (what you may be surprised to know) what appear to be crowded 

 stamens, of a pale purplish color, standing forth from the fleshy 

 part, and all pointing toward the central hollow, to each of which 

 there suceeds a flattened yellowish seed. M1 It is most remarkable 

 that, two hundred years after this clear description of fig flowers, 

 Linnaeus should have placed Ficus among the genera of cryptogams. 



Fruit and Seed. Not Brunfels, nor Fuchs, nor Tragus shows 

 sign of ever having read Theophrastus' scientific definition of a fruit. 

 As far as my careful reading has gone the Greek's term pericarp 

 first reappears in Cordus; and he uses it frequently. Then, in 

 his full descriptions of various plants it comes out that he has made 

 sections, longitudinal and transverse, of many pericarps, so as to be 

 able to record the number of the seeds when they are not too numer- 

 ous, or the number of rows in which they arrange themselves when 

 the number of the seeds is too great to be told. While the elder 

 German authors have quite minutely and well described the 

 curious and beautiful seeds of cardiospermum, this youth, as if 

 belonging to a later generation and to a later century than the 



Hist. PL, p. 184. In my copy of Cordus, and presumably in the whole 

 edition, a word has been omitted by the printer. As printed, the first line 

 about fig flowers reads: "Flores, ut omnes tradiderunt, fert, sed statim 

 parva fructuum rudimenta." This is wholly unintelligible, as a sentence, 

 until you supply the negative non before fert, so that the reading shall be, 

 " non fert. " Cordus' manuscript was not printed until seventeen years after 

 his death. 



