90 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



attributing to him any general recognition of all sympetalous 

 corollas as being such as that to which later generations have 

 arrived; for evident 1 y he had not proceeded far along this line of 

 anthological research, but was only at the beginning of the subject. 

 Having so perfectly settled the monophyllous structure of the 

 small and quite choripetalous-looking olive blossom, we are disap- 

 pointed that he has not done as much for that of the elder tree. 

 It is a tree in which he has manifested a special interest, and with 

 which he has grown very familiar. The thin wood of its shoots 

 and branches, along with an extraordinary development of pith; 

 then externally the remarkably long internodes, and the foliage, 

 from watching the falling of which in autumn he seems to have 

 learned the very important classification of leaves as simple and 

 compound all these aspects of Sambucus he has noted fully. Will 

 he not perceive that its flowers, like those of the olive, are of that 

 structure which he designates as monophyllous ? They are too small; 

 much smaller than those of the olive tree; even quite minute to 

 one who is without a lens; and Theophrastus may not have ex- 

 amined them very carefully as individual flowers. Either that, 

 or else, in condescension to popular usage, he permits the corymb 

 or umbel of small flowers to pass for a flower. And so he describes 

 the blossoming of the elder thus: "The flower is white, composed 

 of many small ones all white, the whole with the appearance of a 

 honeycomb, and attached to the summit of a shoot by a number 

 of stalks. " There is another type of monophyllous flower not as 

 small, which first and last remained to him an enigma. It was 

 the ovate, hollow, and pitcher-shaped corolla of Arbutus unedo, a 

 most common type among ericaceous plants. He says it is not 

 a leafy flower; an expression equivalent to the modern phrase 

 apetalous flower. He describes it as being in the form of an 

 egg-shell with one end cut off, leaving an aperture. 2 He can 

 not have detected the five obscure recurved teeth at the orifice; 

 for they would have taught him that this, like the faintly 

 five-angled morning-glory blossom, is of five almost completely 

 united leaves. 



One chapter of the Historia opens with a sentence like this: 

 " Flowers differ in respect to their origin and insertion. " 3 It is one 

 out of a number of Theophrastus' brief statements of significant 

 fact, any one of which would have rendered famous any herbarist 

 of the sixteenth century or the seventeenth who had been privi- 



i Hist., Book iii, ch. 13. 2 Ibid., ch. 16. 



3 Hisl., Book i, ch. 22. 



