IV. THE FLOWER. 77 



9 



This green boss is called by botanists the pistil, which 

 word consists of the two first syllables of the Latin pistil- 

 linn, otherwise more familiarly Englished into ' pestle.' 

 The meaning of the botanical word is of course, also, that 

 the central part of a flower- cnp has to it something of the 

 relations that a pestle has to a mortar ! Practically, how- 

 ever, as this pestle has no pounding functions, I think the 

 woid is misleading as well as ungraceful; and that we 

 may find a better one after looking a little closer into the 

 matter. For this pestle is divided generally into three 

 very distinct parts : there is a storehouse at the bottom of 

 it for the seeds of the plant ; above this, a shaft, often of 

 considerable length in deep cups, rising to the level of 

 their upper edge, or above it ; and at the top of these 

 shafts an expanded crest. This shaft the botanists call 

 ' style,' from the Greek word for a pillar ; and the crest of 

 it I do not know why stigma, from the Greek word for 

 ' spot.' The storehouse for the seeds they call the ' ovary,' 

 from the Latin ovum, an egg. So you have two-thirds of 

 a Latin word, (pistil) awkwardly and disagreeably edged 

 in between pestle and pistol for the whole thing ; you 

 have an English- Latin word (ovary) for the bottom of it; 

 an English-Gi^k word (style) for the middle ; and a 

 pure Greek word (stigma) for the top. 



17. This is a great mess of language, and all the worse 

 that the words style and stigma have both of them quite 

 different senses in ordinary and scholarly English from 

 this forced botanical one. And I will venture therefore. 



