EARLY STUDIES OF THE FLOWER 347 



the year 1600 a collective name for all the parts which 

 are concerned with seed-production. Spigel enumerates 

 them as we should now do, except that he includes the 

 flower-stalk. Hitherto neither the calyx nor the im- 

 mature seed-vessel was usually reckoned part of the 

 flower, which (as with Theophrastus) meant corolla and 

 nothing more. 



Calyx and sepal. The word calyx, which is found 

 in Aristotle, Theophrastus and Pliny, long denoted any 

 cup-like structure which enclosed seeds ; a pod, for 

 example, might be called a calyx. Fuchs calls it a kind 

 of bag which encloses first the flower and afterwards the 

 seeds — a definition which excludes the deciduous calyx. 

 Valerius Cordus, like Fuchs, hesitated to give this name 

 to a whorl of separate leaves. As late as 1720 we find 

 Pontedera, in his Anthologia, explaining that the calyx 

 belongs rather to the fruit than to the flower, which is 

 just what Theophrastus would have said. It was only 

 by degrees that shape, texture and duration were 

 ignored, and that the term became purely morpholo- 

 gical. Sepal was introduced by Necker (1790) ; before 

 that date the divisions of the calyx were called leaves, 

 foliola, &c. 



Corolla and petal. What we now call corolla bore 

 in ancient times the name of flower, which included 

 sometimes the stamens and styles, but not knowingly 

 the immature fruit. Corolla seems to have been intro- 

 duced by Linnaeus; De Candolle indeed traces it to 

 Tournefort, but I have been unable to verify this 

 statement. Petal, which is merely an adaptation of 

 a Greek word for leaf, goes back to Fabius Columna 

 (1592), but long after this date it continued to be called 

 folium. 



Stamen, anther and filament. Ancient boUniats 



