THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 83 



Legumes. — The words legume and leguminosae have 

 very definite meanings in our day, but at the time that the 

 present meanings were crystaHizing about the words it miglit 

 have been quite proper to call an apple or a gooseberry a 

 legume. The word is from the Latin legcre meaning to gather 

 and was long ago applied to various cultivated plants whose 

 fruit was gathere'd, to distinguish them from those others 

 which were cut down and the desired parts beaten out. Wheat 

 and barley were of course not legumes, because the fruits 

 were not gathered by hand, but beans, peas, lupines and the 

 like, which were taken from the plants in the field, were known 

 by this term. It is doubtless due to the fact that plants with 

 pods predominated in the gathered crops, that the word le- 

 gume has at last come to stand only for plants bearing pods, 

 and to give the name to one of the most useful and handsome 

 of plant families. 



Contents of Seeds. — A seed is sometimes defined as a 

 young plant enclosed in a hard outer covering often with more 

 or less albumen or food. For most plants this definition would 

 hold good. In the common bean, for example, we find at 

 maturity a slender axis, which is destined to be the beginning 

 stem, to which are attached one or more cotyledons and other 

 rudimentary leaves. But this is not always the case. In 

 some plants, such as many Ranunculaceae, when the seeds are 

 ripe, that is, when they are ready to fall from the plant, the 

 plantlet that should be within is represented merely by a mass 

 of undifferentiated cells, and in other plants there are all gra- 

 dations of this up to complete embryos. In those seeds in 

 which the embryo is not well developed, when the seed is ripe, 

 the young plantlet continues to develop while the seed is dor- 

 mant. One of the extreme cases is found in the maidenhair 

 tree or ginkgo where the fertilization necessary to begin the 

 embryo plant does not take place until the seed has fallen from 



