AXDROEcir:\r axd GixoEcirM 221 



and they supply a need in floral terminology which cannot be readih^ 

 expressed or made intelligible in any other way. 



It is interesting to note that in this country the anglicized version 

 gynoeciinn (with a diphthong), as correlated with androecium was 

 early adopted by George Bentham (1832, Labiatarum Gen. et Sp. 

 p. xxvii), and was continued into the Genera JBlantarum (1862, i. 

 p. v) of Bentham and Hooker ; the same usage may be noted in 

 Hooker's edition of Le Maont and Decaisne (1873, p. 64), as also in 

 J. H. Balfour's Class Book of Botany (1854, p. 239) ; just as 

 Lindley's Glossary of Botanical Terms gives gynoecium (1848). 

 Hence the spelling of gynoecium maj^ be accepted as the standard 

 established for English writers, by botanists of such rank as Bentham, 

 Hooker, Lindle}^ and Balfour, and has been correctly continued bv 

 Bower (1919), as it was also accepted hj Asa Gray (1879, Structural 

 Botany, p. 165 in 1887 edit.), the latter following Bentham and mis- 

 quoting Roeper, whose paper he had probably not seen. On these 

 grounds the same spelling was adopted in Floral Mechanism (Church, 

 1908). 



A little knowledge of Greek may it is true be often worse than 

 none at all [cf. Kraus, Verhand. Wiirzburg, 1908, p. 10), and it is 

 perfectly time, as anyone with a lexicon can find out, that the Greeks 

 had a name for the " female apartments " of a house, based on the 

 stem yvvaiK — as ywaiK^wv, commonly rendered gynaeceum in Latin 

 (but also gyneciumy with another word gynaeconitis), the word 

 *' gynaeceum " being even continued by the Romans for a factory 

 employing female labour, the superintendent of which would be a 

 gynaecius. These facts maj'' be interesting to a philologist, but thev 

 have nothing to do with the Avords coined by Koeper for strictly 

 botanical purposes, and not involving any question of actual women 

 at all. As a matter of fact, the Greeks, as might be expected, also 

 had a word for the "men's apartments" as avhpelov, avcpojr, latinized 

 as andron (andreum, andrium, cf. andronitis) ; these terms being 

 equally correlative ; i. <?., the use of one implying the use of the 

 other. The choice is obviously between Boeper's pair and the Greek 

 pair or their Latin equivalents ; to mix them is futile. Who the 

 interfering busybody may have been who first resurrected gynaeceum 

 is not clear, nor does it much matter ; the word spelt in this manner 

 appears in Link (1837, p. 86) and Lindley (1832, p. 138), appa- 

 rently as a misunderstanding. But it is important to note that it 

 also appears in Sach's Lehrhuch of 1870 (p. 458), associated with the 

 original form androeceum (p. 444) ; and as more modern text-books 

 have been largely based on this work in Germany and in. this country, 

 people brought up on Sachs have contended for or continued the 

 erroneous version of the word (Goebel, Drude, Frank, Schumann). 

 That is to say, the c of androecium represents the k of oIkos (as in 

 *• dioecious " and " monoecious " of Linnaeus), and so would the c of 

 gynoecium-, but the c of gynaeceum represents the k of yvvaiK, the 

 full stem of yvvT] (woman), and any association with an oIkos vanishes. 

 It may be asserted that Roeper to be technically perfect, should have 

 written gynaec-oeceum (Kraus), but no Greek would have thought 



