92 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



describing such plants as to their flowering he makes frequent 

 use of terms equivalent to spike, raceme, and umbel, though not 

 with such definiteness of meaning as they convey in modern 

 botany. In these clusterings it is observed that the flowering of 

 the whole cluster at once seldom takes place; that usually the 

 lowest flowers are first to expand, then those next above them, 

 this succession continuing in some plants so long that the seeds 

 from the basal flowers are ripe before the terminal flowers have 

 opened. The aromatic garden herb ocymum is named as a case 

 in point; 1 but he mentions this kind of inflorescence repeatedly. 

 He also names one plant whose flowering begins at the top, the 

 succession of later bloom following downwardly. Thus is Theo- 

 phrastus again a botanical discoverer. He has distinguished 

 between the centripetal and the centrifugal in inflorescences. The 

 historian Meyer was surprised at this, remarking also that he knew 

 of no other botanist's having noted this distinction again until 

 the time of Link and Robert Brown. 2 It is evident that Meyer 

 pondered the fine picture books of his compatriots of the sixteenth 

 century, Brunfels, Fuchs, and Tragus, to the neglect of the one 

 real botanist that there had been among them all, Valerius Cordus. 



Fruit and Seed. Without fully appreciating the significance of 

 truit and seed as furnishing the best clew to plant affinities, Theo- 

 phrastus nevertheless studied them assiduously. Even flowers in 

 their beauty and fragrance, and by their multitudinous forms, 

 engaged him chiefly as being heralds of the fruit and seed. The 

 perfecting of fruit he alludes to here and there as being the culmi- 

 nation of the plant's existence. He notes it that even such vig- 

 orous and enduring things as trees and shrubs shorten their life 

 period by excessive fruit-bearing; that myriad annuals live but the 

 length of one summer season because they exhaust all their vitality 

 in the yielding of their one crop of seeds. Seeds were of very special 

 interest, in his view; and succeeding generations of botanists have 

 been with him in that opinion. 



The scientific examiner of even commonest objects finds more 

 things in nature than there are names for in common language. 

 The investigator of things is therefore obliged to be the inventor 

 of new terms; and every science has therefore its vocabulary of 

 special terms, every one of them necessary to the science and to the 

 man of science, but to the world at large useless. In connection 

 with his study of seeds, Theophrastus was obliged to invent ne 



i Hist., Book vii, ch. 3. 



1 Meyer, Geschichte der Botanik, vol. i, p. 166. 



