LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 87 



walnut, the oaks, and many more. He gave them a name, zojUo^^i 

 Latinized as jtili, writing about them so minutely and describing 

 them so well as to attest his perfect familiarity with them; but 

 apparently the more he studied them the more enigmatic did they 

 seem.- The filbert, Corylus avellana, not only grows wild in 

 Greece, but it had been cultivated there doubtless for ages before 

 Theophrastus' time. It would be irrational to question that it was 

 among the shrubs of that botanic garden in the midst of which lay 

 his daily walks for many years. At all events, his perfect fa- 

 miliarity with its tassels is attested by the following account which 

 he gives of them. " In autumn after the nuts have fallen, there 

 appear in bunches of several certain things that look like worms, 

 inserted on a short thick stalk. These are called juli. Each is 

 made up of countless scales arranged somewhat after the manner 

 of those of the nut pine {Pinus pinea, Linn.), the whole longer in 

 proportion to its thickness than that, and also of equal thickness 

 throughout. Before the end of winter it begins to grow. In early 

 spring the scales separate and stand apart, and are then become 

 yellow, the whole then sometimes as much as three inches long. 

 When the leaves begin to put forth, these things shrivel and fall. 

 Then the cups that enclose the nuts develop; one cup for each 

 flower, and one nut in a cup."-' 



The concluding sentence places it beyond doubt that the writer 

 knew the crimson pistils of the shrub as well as he did the yellow 

 aments. He does not stop to describe them. They are of his 

 class of capillary flowers, and that is enovigh. In a later chapter,* 

 in which he brings out the habit and vegetative characters of the 

 filberts, indicating two species (C. avellana, Linn., and C. tubidosa, 

 Willd.) by differences of fruit, he has no occasion to mention again 

 the flowers, but can not forego renewed allusion to those per- 

 plexing aments. " To these shrubs belong that julus of compacted 

 scales which we have elsewhere described." The sterile aments 

 of the oaks, slender, lax, more tufted than those of the hazel as 

 well as of short duration, must also have been known to Theo- 

 phrastus ; and so were the colorless and very inconspicuous pistillate 

 flowers; for, while he quotes the popular opinion of his time that 



' Hist., Book iii, ch. 7. 



2 Pliny, some three centuries after Theophrastus, refers to the juli of the 

 filbert in terms that prove them still incomprehensible to nature students 

 of the time. He says they are ad nihil utiles: which we remark is a negation, 

 and therefore unscientific. 



3 Hist., Book iii, ch. 7. " Ibid., ch. 15. , 



