112 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



description of them, even without Theophrastus' having named 

 those particular genera, adding that other denizens of marshy 

 grounds have such foUage. Even the palms — of which he knew 

 only Phoenix, pinnate-fronded — he cites by name as being arundi- 

 naceous.' Such reeds and rushes as to him seemed quite leafless 

 would still vindicate to themselves places within the group by 

 virtue of their altogether pithy or else hollow stems or culms. We 

 are sure, then, that this assemblage of the Calamodes embraced all 

 true grasses, all sedges, besides the juncaceous, typhaceous, spargan- 

 iacous, plants, and palms. It will be observed that all are mono- 

 cotyledonous; that the group embraces by far the greater proportion 

 of such ; only the showily spathaceous and the really petaliferous 

 genera being left out. Recalling here the circumstance that in all 

 early taxonomy roots figure very conspicuously, it becomes inter- 

 estingly significant that into this great class of the Calamodes, — 

 a group which, as regards the number of species, comes near 

 being the equivalent of our endogens — not a genus is admitted 

 that has either bulb or corm. Every member of the vast assem- 

 blage has copious fibrous roots ; these in moiety of the species sup- 

 plemented, as Theophrastus might have worded it, by that which 

 he had chosen to name the jointed root, i. e., the slender rhizome; 

 a single sedge, Cyperus esculentus, bearing nut-like protuberances 

 as if at the ends of some few of the root fibres. There is not 

 the shadow of a doubt that this pristine plant anatomist and 

 systematist recognized the structure of leaf-stalk and flower-stalk 

 of Arum and Colocasia as at full agreement with that of half his 

 Calamodes; and the same must have been familiar to him in the 

 case of the grassy-leaved crocus and its allies; and the "roots" of 

 these must have excluded them from taxonomic consociation with 

 the rest, in all probability, even had their flowers been leafless and 

 less in contrast to those of grass and reed and sedge. The aggre- 

 gate of bulbous and cormose plants, the araceous I think excepted, 

 were known and spoken of by him as PoXfioDdjjg — the Bulbaceae. 

 As a group it contained, first of all and typically, the onion and its 

 several congeners, even the leek, a plant that though alliaceous is 

 not bulbous; after these the bulbous Liliaceae, Amaryllidaceae, and 

 the cormose iris allies. With the types and several of the species 

 of all these he was familiarly acquainted. 



There are other natural families not a few of which Theophrastus 

 apprehended with precision, even assigning names to several of 

 them. Such are the Umbelliferae, for an example, to which as a 



1 Hist., Book i, ch. 16. 



