THE PLANT WORLD 71 



Editorial. 



One result of the advance in our knowledge of plant development 

 and relationships has been that many of the familiar old descriptive terms 

 have entirely lost their technical applications and are now found only 

 in popular usage. The chief reason for this state of affairs is that the 

 botany of earlier generations was confined to the study of flowering 

 plants. Little or no attention was paid to the hosts of fungi, seaweeds, 

 and mosses that awaited examination, and such subjects as physiology 

 and cytology were scarcely known. So it happened that botanical 

 terminology was concerned almost wholly with the various organs of 

 seed plants, all of which received special names based on their supposed 

 analogies. But the development of the theory of evolution, in connec- 

 tion with the discoveries of organs in the lower plants exactly corre- 

 sponding to those of the higher, has rendered this class of words no 

 longer applicable. Yet they are firmly grounded in popular usage, and 

 we can not arbitrarily kill a word, though we may create a dozen better 

 ones to take its place. Hence, the writers of modern text-books labor 

 under the disadvantage on the one hand of using language that may be 

 scientifically inaccurate, and on the other, of using technicalities beyond 

 the comprehension of the readers whom they address. It is a difficult 

 problem, in truth ; for in these days of lively interest in nature study, 

 the public demands full information condensed into a few chapters — the 

 wisdom of generations evaporated to the crystallizing point, and the un- 

 happy' author is accordingly unable to digress from his subject to give 

 needful explanations. Even the best of our books on descriptive botany 

 give a distorted idea of plant affinities simply because they make use of 

 worn-out descriptive terms. To illustrate this, let us consider the words 

 "phanerogam" and "cryptogam," familiar to every one who has read 

 even elementary botanical literature. Flowering plants, or seed plants 

 as w^e prefer to call them, were originally called phanerogams (which 

 means open or evident marriage) because within the more or less showy 

 flowers were found what were supposed to be sex organs, called stamens 

 and pistils. The transfer of pollen from the stamen to the pistil, the 

 resulting fertilization of the ovules and development of the seeds, con- 

 stituted apparently a simple process, entirely analogous to sexual repro- 

 duction in animals. On the other hand, the ferns and all lower plants 

 were seen to develop from spores, which were evidently without sex ; so 

 they were called cryptogams, this word meaning a hidden or secret 

 marriage. 



But what are the facts ? Modern science has proved to us that seed 

 plants produce spores like all other plants ; that the stamens and pistils 



