286 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



throughout the one family of the nightshades must rank among 

 the most important contributions ever made to anthology; for 

 it was the first hint ever given of a truly scientific classification of 

 floral organs. 



The truthfulness of this last statement will remain unimpeached 

 notwithstanding that Cordus did not name the calyx as forming a 

 part of the flower. It was too early for the expression of anything 

 so iconoclastic as that. From the earliest dawn of botany down 

 through uncounted ages, a circle of green-colored leaves, no matter 

 what their size or form, or where placed, had been a circle of leaves, 

 and a whorl of leaf-like organs colored otherwise than green had 

 been a flower. Even in the mind of young Cordus this appears to 

 have been a prejudice too deeply seated to fade away even before the 

 light of his own brilliant discoveries. He never admitted the calyx 

 to the rank of a floral organ; though he seeems upon the verge of 

 doing so. In describing the "flower" of the white water lily he 

 actually sets apart, as too different from the others, those four 

 outer members which are green externally and which also, as he 

 says, completely enfold all the others, and he gives to them col- 

 lectively a name by which they must be distinguished from the 

 many and narrower white "flower leaves"; the name is not calyx 

 but "tunica."^ He does not, however, look on them as partaking 

 so much of the nature of a calyx as of ordinary flower leaves. He 

 observes that they are not altogether of that green color which at 

 first glance they seem to be, but that at summit and marginally 

 they are of the same texture and whiteness as the others. They 

 impress him as being modified flower leaves, whereas the green 

 things at the back of buttercups and others like them are but 

 reduced and modified ordinary leaves. The terms calyx and calicu- 

 lus I have failed to find Cordus making use of at all except for such 

 as are synsepalous. If such a circle is quite chorisepalous, or even 

 approximately so, he calls it a circle of leaves simply. He does 

 not overlook the fact that such chorisepalous circle has a particular 

 function, and that in immediate relation to the flower; and here 

 again he seems as on the verge of extending the use of the term 

 flower so as to make it include the calyx; but he never quite does 

 that. His manner of expressing himself in such cases is exempli- 

 fied in his description of what he calls Hepatica alba, which is his 

 name for a new genus of his discovery, its equivalent in modem 

 nomenclature being Parnassia; the type, P. palustris. Here is his 



> Hist. PL, p. 99. 



