LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 235 



that Tragus on his own part was but entertaining himself and some 

 of his readers with mere curiosities; that he had no notion whatever 

 of the real importance, to the future of botany, of that which he was 

 doing. Let us, then, take a still more careful survey of the things 

 which he accomplished in this particular direction which were for 

 the advancement of anthology, albeit he himself was all unconscious 

 of their import. To begin enumerating the stamens of particular 

 flowers, and to record in each instance the count, was to make a 

 decided innovation upon the immemorially established anthology 

 of Tragus' time, which had always treated of them in the aggregate 

 only, as tufts of hairs or threads. If he announces that in every 

 gooseberry blossom there are just five such hairs or knotted threads, 

 that is announcing that he has made two different comparisons 

 of them: first, a comparison of the five one with another, and then of 

 these with two other hairs quite different from them which occupy 

 the very center within their circle. He does not mention these, the 

 styles, or style-branches, yet can not have failed to perceive them. 

 But he now proceeds virtually to define a stamen. It is the little 

 apex, and the hair on whose summit the apex is sustained. Else- 

 where he repeats the definition more explicitly, and, avoiding the 

 use of any new terms, he calls that the " capillamentum " which 

 we now know as the filament, and "apex" is his application of 

 an old term to what has become the anther of modern anthology. 

 Tragus is, then, the discoverer of the stamen as a definable organ 

 made up of two separate and different parts, each part with its own 

 name. The same is very near being true of him as regards also 

 the pistil. We have just seen how accurately he could describe 

 the style and stigma of a lily as things quite apart from the stamens ; 

 and as to the flowers of common fruit trees, we must eel assured that 

 he saw the one style of each plum and cherry blossom that he 

 inspected, and the five of them that are conspicuous in the flowers of 

 pear and apple trees. He did not mention them; but then, they 

 are as plainly visible there as the stamens themselves, and both his 

 enumeration and his definition of these prove that he did not 

 confuse the styles with them. Curiously enough, after having 

 located and well outlined the large lily style and its stigma, the 

 very next account he gives of such central thing is in connection 

 with a flower even smaller than that of a gooseberry, namely, 

 of the little ericaceous undershrub then called Myrtillus.i Here 

 the stamens seem to have escaped his notice, as they easily 



> The Vaccinium of recent botany. 



