ZESTIVATION AND ITS TERMINOLOGY. 187 
claim, obvoluta will be the proper term, beginning as it did 
with Linnzeus for vernation, and taken up, as it was very 
early, by Mirbel for zstivation. The only objections to it 
are, first, that it has never come into systematic use, and, sec- 
ond, that 0b,in the composition of botanical terms, commonly 
stands for obversely or inversely. But obvoluta is not bur- 
dened with this signification: it is classical for “ wrapped 
round,” as is convoluta for rolled together. I conclude that 
one or the other of these two terms ought to be used. 
Finally, although there is little, if any, practical misuse, 
there is some mis-definition, of the term imbricate as applied 
to estivation. Adrien de Jussieu defines it well (in Cours 
Elémentaire, 308) in the phrase “La préfloraison spirale est 
aussi nommé imbriquée” ; and in noting that when the num- 
ber stops at five, the pieces fall into two exterior, two interior, 
and one (the third in the spiral) intermediate, this making 
what is called “ zstivatio quineuncialis.”1 This is clear and 
to the point. But other authors have had a fancy for distin- 
guishing between quincuncial and imbricate (as if the former 
were not the typical case of the latter when the parts are five), 
and so have had to devise something else to answer to imbri- 
eate. Alphonse De Candolle (in his Introd. Bot., i. 154, 
written before phyllotaxy was well understood), after rele- 
gating imbricative to the category of a crowd of verticils, 
and remarking that the quincuncial is sometimes confounded 
with the imbricate, adds that some confound also under this 
latter name the case in which there is one exterior piece, one 
interior, and three covered at one margin but free at the other. 
I know not where this began; but its latest reproduction is in 
Le Maout and Decaisne’s “ Traité Générale’ and in the Eng- 
lish translation of it. In the diagram the pieces are numbered 
directly round the circle from 1 to 5, the fifth coming next 
the first: “so they thus complete one turn of a spiral,” — 
which shows that Le Maout had vague ideas of phyllotaxy, of 
1 The name quincuncial answers the purpose after definition, and has 
long been in use ; but this arrangement in diagram is wholly unlike the 
quincunx, with its four pieces or stars in the periphery, or at the angles 
of a square, and one in the centre. 
