LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 279 



slenderly pointed; these gradually expand and assume the outline of 

 an ivy leaf, though they are much larger, sometimes attaining the 

 length of nine inches, ending in a point, but widening below, yet 

 receding into a sinus where joined to the petiole. In certain locali- 

 ties the leaves are purple spotted. At the same time of the year 

 it sends up another rolled up cloak^ which rests at the summit of a 

 short upright stalk, and which about the middle of May opens to 

 something like the form of a rabbit's or a donkey's ear, and 

 shows within that which may be likened to the pestle of a mortar, 

 is of about the length of the little finger, erect, ol a dull purple or 

 ashy color, and rests on a kind of roughish tubercle, beneath which 

 there is another tuberculation of the same size, but paler as to 

 color. This last-named tuberculation, after the one above it and 

 the pestle have withered, grows to the size of a walnut and takes 

 on the aspect of a bunch of red berries, each berry containing a seed 

 or two a little smaller than a lentile. This thing ripens at about the 

 summer solstice, and the knot of shining berries and its stalk are all 

 that remain visible of the plant at that time ; and when these have 

 fallen away everything disappears. The plant is from a bulbous 

 perennial root of the size of the first joint of the thumb, white, 

 delicate, which is found in a shrunken and withering state under the 

 growing herb, yet after the withering of the herbage is found 

 increased in size and firm. It sends out many eyes or tubercles by 

 means of which the plant is propagated. Every part of the herbage 

 exhales a heavy odor, and is so acrid in flavor as to affect the tongue 

 and palate of him who tastes it as if he had swallowed thistles or 

 briers. The plant inhabits shady places in deep woods, or old and 

 shaded drains and ditches, or along hedges. Some cultivate it in 

 gardens." 



Cordus' descriptions of new types discovered by himself do not 

 differ in plan from the above. Some such are longer, others shorter, 

 according to the requirements of the plant itself as examined by 

 him in minute detail. One sees that in them all the same attention 

 is given to the morphology, and also to the life history of the plant 

 in as far as this is known to him. In his practice of describing each 

 species both morphologically and biologically, he is a herald of our 

 late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers who, now 

 that we have the microscope, give life histories with minuteness 

 of detail before impossible. 



It will also be observed that Cordus' descriptions of plants 



1 Cordus' Latin word here is involucrum. 



