LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 20$ 



has seen, and what all the botanical authors before him had seen, 

 is a tuft of delicate things standing up from the midst of the circle 

 of colored flower leaves. The ancients had written of them as 

 fiocci, or as capillamenta, still only in the plural. No one had ever 

 looked into the individuality of one of those flocci or capillamenta. 

 To have done that would have been to lead the way to the discovery 

 that the members of the filamentose tuft are not all alike; that at 

 least the one central member — if not the whole central membership 

 of the tuft — is different from those that stand between them and 

 the circumference of the flower. There would soon have been two 

 kinds of stamens to describe if one stamen had been defined, 

 because of those — the styles and their stigmas — ^which would not 

 have answered to the definition. 



Now Fuchsius in practice writes of these tufted things in the 

 middle of a flower as the apices. This is a distinct departure from 

 the terminology of antiquity, and is withal a departure in the 

 right direction; for the ancients had seen and written of flocci, 

 capillamenta, and the German had seen — per haps by some unknown 

 mediceval botanist had been taught to see — the little knots that 

 surmount the outer set of the flocci, and from these little apical knots 

 the whole stamen-tuft had been named anew, "apices." This 

 term, whensoever it made its appearance, came in like a kind of 

 prophecy that the terminal knots were one day to be received as 

 the only essential parts of the tuft. One would willingly concede to 

 Fuchsius the invention of this term which shows that anthers are 

 being noticed; but he was in no sense a botanical discoverer, and 

 he availed himself of many an old book and manuscript of which 

 we have no knowledge. 



For the staminate tassels of hazel, walnut, and oak trees he has 

 also now a name; whereas the ancients seem to have had none. 

 But he has no more idea what these tassels are for than the ancients 

 had; though he ventures the guess that they are instead of flowers; 

 thereby proving that he had never seen the pistillate or real flowers 

 of any of them. He calls the pendents nucamenta, nut-tassels, and 

 describes them in language borrowed from Theophrastus who, 

 as we have been learning, had a much better knowledge of nut-tree 

 flowers then Fuchsius ever attained to. 



Fruit and Seed. The Greek ^philosopher's comprehensive and 

 classic definition of a fruit is either unknown to Fuchsius, or else 

 he purposely condescends to the popular notion; for he says that a 

 fruit is something made up of flesh and seeds. This is quite in 

 keeping with his definition of a raceme as being a cluster of fruits. 



