l 7& , The Botanical Gazette. [June, 



A 



BRIEFER ARTICLES. 



aarestion on the proper terminology of the spermaphytie flow- 

 er-— Faults in botanical terminology are, as in all other branches of 

 science, very numerous. The more striking ones may perhaps be 

 classed under a two-fold grouping— those which represent actual dif- 

 ferences of opinions among authorities or different methods of naming 

 the same phenomenon and those which indicate the vis inertia of the 



■ 



science on account of which universally abandoned notions are per- 

 petuated by the retaining of the unmeaning or misleading words 

 which were applied when erroneous ideas regarding anatomy, develop- 

 ment and homologies were the only ones known to botanists. Of the 

 first mentioned group the words Phanerogam or Gymnosperm are 

 good examples. No one supposes that the Phanerogams are really 

 the plants in which fertilization is distinct — as was the notion of Lin- 

 naeus. The word to-day may be applied to the group of plants which 

 produce embryos and pollen-tubes — the Embryophyta Siphonogama 

 of Engler, or it may be defined as the group which produces seeds and 

 suspensors, or as the group in which one may distinguish the three 

 embryonic layers of Hanstein and secondary endosperm. It makes no 

 difference; the word is good enough if one defines it correctly. 

 Whether one says Anthophyte, Spermaphyte, Seed Plant or Phanero- 

 gam is unimportant. So whether one defines the Gymnosperms as 

 seed-plants with apical cells as Van Tieghem defines them, as Archi- 

 spermous flowering-plants after Strasburger, as polyembryonic seed- 

 plants, as seed-plants with suppressed secondary endosperm, as flow- 

 ering plants with uncompressed floral axes; whether one accepts the 

 view of Eichler regarding the homology of the cone or that of Baillon 

 is of no importance. In any case the words are correct enough and 

 express very well what one wishes to express when one uses them. 



I he other group of erroneous terms can not be dismissed so lightly. 

 One of the most confusing places for the novice in botany is that part 

 of the ordinary text-book which treats of the flower. The old and 

 mistaken notion that flowers contain male and female organs took 

 such hold of the authors on botany that, to this day, although it is 

 about fifty years since the idea was abandoned, one can find nothing 

 but confusion m the terms which are applied to the various phases 

 and parts of flowers. Grayi speaks of hermaphrodite, unisexual, male 

 and female flowers; Sachs of hermaphrodite flowers, of sexual organs 

 -meaning stamens and pis tils^; Gcebel of unisexual flowers and 



Structural Botany p. 191. 



'Physiology of Plants, Eng. tran. p. m and elsewhere. 



