94 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



using over and over again such exceedingly important taxonomic 

 terms as angiosperm and gymnosperm. The fact is, he employed 

 neither in anything like that breadth of meaning which they convey 

 as used in later botany; but both of them very restrictedly. He 

 used angiosperm only to designate one particular circumscription 

 of what are known with us as capsular fruits, namely, the sub- 

 globose or urn-shaped or vase-like kinds. The example given is 

 "that of the poppy and those like it." It is corrrelative with 

 Xo^ns, the Theophrastan name for all leguminous fruits. His 

 gymnosperms include nothing really gymnospermous in our 

 taxonomic use of that expression. By the examples cited, " cori- 

 ander, anise, fennel, cyminum," and several others among kitchen- 

 garden plants, the gymnosperms were the umbellifers. They were 

 naked-seeded to him, because, as already noted, he had not recog- 

 nized any such organ as a calyx; one nowhere in all the plant 

 world more recondite than in the umbellifers. The only real 

 gymnosperms — according to our application of the term — which 

 he knew, were the conifers; but they do not enter, with the um- 

 bellifers, into his category of that name. He expresses distinctly 

 though modestly the idea as his own that, as to fruit and seed these 

 stand naturally aloof from all other groups, and thinks the view 

 may be tenable that cones are not fruits at all. " No trees bear 

 capsular fruits, unless you can call a cone a capsule; but it is pos- 

 sible to regard the cone as different from a fruit." Under the 

 head of anthology it was seen that the cone-scale at its flowering 

 stage was a flower-leaf in Theophrastus' understanding of it. 

 Logically, therefore, he would have regarded it in its maturity 

 as a sort of pericarp. But that he left the cones in a place apart, 

 as unclassifiable with other seed vessels — the types of what were 

 to be named gymnosperms twenty centuries afterwards — is yet 

 another evidence of the profound sagacity of the protobotanist. 

 After these things, it is no longer with any surprise that we read 

 his accurate descriptions — descriptions of them from center to 

 circumference — of such fruits as the drupe, the pome, the nut, 

 fig, pomegranate, and other types, and citing as he always does 

 familiar examples of each different kind. But that he should 

 have been as near as he was to a systematizing of the placental 

 attachment of seeds within the pericarp is again almost startling; 

 for when he records it that in many the seeds are as it were pro- 

 miscuously crowded within the pericarp, while in others they are 

 ranged in regular lines, or at least in separate groups — of which 

 latter he says the squash, cucumber, and apple are examples — we 



