86 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



time, that many flowers have two circles of organs, a flower within 

 a flower, the one within readily distinguishable from the broad, 

 leafy one outside. He does not formally name this inside flower, 

 qut he has fotmd so many flowers that lack the leafy outside circle 

 altogether, displaying nothing but the inner, that he names this 

 kind capillary or woolly flowers. It must here be affirmed that 

 Theophrastus knows nothing of the calyx as being any part of a 

 flower. The color and texture of floral organs were what distin- 

 guished them from ordinary foliage; and by their points of agree- 

 ment with the latter any green leaf-like organ or circle, however 

 near the "flower," would fail to be included as a part of it. Also 

 the ovary and ovules were not indicated or received as organs of 

 the flower. They were simply the fruit or seed, in whatever stage 

 from that of the flowering to that of full maturity; and this neither 

 through dullness nor indifference. The colored leaves, together 

 with the colored threads, set in the midst of them, were all there 

 was to the flower. One may fancy some brilliant Greek pupil 

 asking the master if that protuberance in the middle of many 

 flowers ought not to be regarded as a part of the flower, and called 

 the fruit, ought not to be called by a name of its own while in the 

 flowering stage. He who knows the keenly penetrating and severely 

 logical mind of Theophrastus will infer without chance of a mis- 

 take, what the substance of his answer would have been. At what 

 particular point in its development will that protuberance begin 

 to be a fruit ? I suppose that such logic might silence the ablest 

 morphologist who has lived hitherto. Our modern term ovary 

 is but an illogical convenience. It suitably abbreviates the follow- 

 ing expression: " fruit at the budding or flowering stages and for an 

 indefinite period thereafter." Our neighbors the industrial bot- 

 anists even of to-day have no need of the term ovary and ignore it. 

 When a hard unseasonable frost has sterilized the ovaries of their 

 trees, whether in bud or in flower, it is the " fruit " that has been 

 killed; and so the Theophrastan anthology still lives and is widely 

 though unwittingly approved. 



What are now known as the styles were not segregated from the 

 other flocci, or capillamenta — that is, from the stamens — until 

 ages after Theophrastus. He made no distinction between these 

 two, at least when found together within the same flower; and 

 his capillary flower might consist of stamens alone, or of styles only, 

 or of both. What is more, there are certain arrangements of 

 stamens under which they failed to gain recognition by him as 

 being of the nature of floral parts, as in the aments of hazel, the 



