LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 85 



any other three chapters of scientific matter ever written, in respect 

 to the terseness and brevity with which important propositions 

 follow one another in close succession. ^ His first proposition as to 

 the general morphology of the flower is this: "Some flowers are 

 capillary, like those of the grape, mulberry, and ivy; others are 

 composed of leaves, like those of the almond, apple, pear, and plum 

 trees. "2 These are trees; but he proceeds to say that quite the 

 same is true of the flowers of herbaceous and annual plants, some 

 of which have foliaceous flowers, others capillary. It is evident 

 as can be that by examining the earliest germs of fruit in plants 

 that never show flower-leaves, he has found those fruit-germs at a 

 certain early period encircled by hair-like or filamentose things 

 quite as transient as flower-leaves, and which seem in some way 

 to take the place of them, though they have not always the usual 

 special coloring of flower-leaves. On the strength of what he has 

 studiously observed, he has now virtually given to the term avdog, 

 flower, a new definition, a scientific one. The term must embrace 

 whatever is intimately though transiently connected with a fruit- 

 germ, whether laminal and colored or filamentose and greenish. 

 This, in so far as written records show, is the earliest proposition 

 ever laid down concerning the morphology of the flower ; and it was 

 a mighty contribution to scientific botany. It is in substance the 

 distinction of petaliferous and apetalous flowers. It will therefore 

 hold its place in the science of plant life and form as long as such 

 a science shall exist. 



The investigations of Theophrastus along the line of what we 

 denominate apetalous flowers appear to have opened his eyes to the 

 presence of the capillary organs in a large and showy petaliferous 

 kind ; for in this same chapter he states that many flowers are two- 

 fold, showing another flower inside the main one. He cites such 

 familiar garden flowers as the rose, violet, and white lily as ex- 

 amples; and, as against any suspicion of ours that his twofold 

 flower of rose and violet and lily might mean a double flower, as 

 composed of multiplied petals within the main outer circle, there 

 occurs the one word Sixpoa, two-colored, or differently colored. 

 It is, of course, the stamens within the corolla of red rose, purple 

 violet, and white lily that are colored differently from the corolla. 

 This is the earliest recognition of the flower as other than a simple 

 organ. It is the beginning of the classification of its parts; a 

 small beginning, but highly significant. It is given out for the first 



1 Hist., Book i, chs. 20, 21, 22. 



2 Ibid., ch. 21. 



