84 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



botany as we have it has been engendered; and the originator of 

 that idea would have been the father of botany even if he had 

 accomplished nothing further. 



There is one thing which he who would know, even in outline 

 only and superficially, the history of botany, must not do. When 

 in Theophrastus he meets with the word avOo^, or in Pliny 

 with the term "flos," he must use care not to read into that term 

 the meaning which the word flower has in modern botany; for, if 

 he assume that the word stood, with those authors as with us, for 

 a congeries of four circles of different organs, beginning with the 

 calyx and ending with the gynoecium, he will never correctly appre- 

 hend a word they say about the flower. That view of the com- 

 prehensiveness of the flower which we now take, extremely unlike 

 the ancient idea, was really first presented for acceptance within 

 somewhat less than two hundred years from the date at which I 

 write. The flos of remote antiquity, the pre-Theophrastan anthos, 

 appears to have been simply the corolla, as we have said before; 

 and that without a special name as such. It was but a set of leaves, 

 shaped and colored and arranged differently from ordinary foliage, 

 and having for its function the protecting of the future fruit and 

 seed while in their tender and rudimentary stages. 



Now oaks, walnut trees, alders, and hazels have no corollas. 

 They had been considered flowerless because they have none, and 

 correctly enough so long as the flower was defined as a whorl or 

 tuft of specially altered and colored leaves; and it was so defined 

 in the minds of the majority of people in that time, as it is in the 

 minds of untold thousands in every land to-day. And the very 

 possibility of detecting upon oaks and filbert bushes some small 

 thing that should mark the point of origin and presage the coming 

 of each nut and acorn involved the possibility of a revolution in 

 the idea and definition of a flower; an extension of the term, to 

 make it embrace anything, no matter how colorless, shapeless, and 

 obscure, which should be found in the place where a flower ought 

 to be. 



This earliest Historia Plantarum, intensely interesting though 

 t be as we have it, would have been still more so had its author 

 given some record of his own processes of research; his successes 

 and his failures in attempting to find flowers on trees and herbs 

 that had the reputation of being flowerless. But the traditions 

 of the lyceum at Athens were against that. Men were taught that 

 knowledge is best communicated in language concise and brief; 

 and Theophrastus' three short chapters of anthology may vie with 



