104 Artificial Systems and Terminology of [Book i. 



remains a naked insect. When the flower is produced in the plant 

 the rind opens and forms the calyx (exactly Cesalpino's view), 

 and from out of this the inner parts of the plant issue to form 

 the flower, so that the bast, the wood, and the pith issue forth 

 naked in the form of corolla, stamens, and stigma. So long as 

 the plant lies concealed within the rind and clothed only with 

 leaves, it appears to us as unrecognisable and obscure as a 

 butterfly, which in its larva-condition is covered with skin and 



spines. 



In this doctrine of metamorphosis, which Linnaeus founded 

 on Cesalpino, the chief point to observe is, that the ordinary 

 leaves are identical with the exterior parts of the flower, because 

 both originate in the outer tissues of the stem. The pertinent 

 fact, which may easily be observed without a microscope, that 

 the concentric arrangement of outer and inner rind, wood, and 

 pith occurs only in some flowering plants, that the case is quite 

 different with Monocotyledons, and that Cesalpino's theory of 

 the flower cannot properly be applied to them,— these are 

 things which we must not expect to find Linnaeus with his 

 peculiar modes of thought taking into consideration. 



The want of firm standing-ground in experience is shown 

 also by the fact, that with his own and Cesalpino's theory of 

 the flower he combined another view of its nature, which under 

 the name of ' prolepsis plantarum ' was set forth in two disserta- 

 tions in 1760 and 1763, but the two theories are scarcely com- 

 patible with one another. While the last paragraph in the 

 ' Philosophia Botanica ' says, ' Flos ex gemma annuo spatio foliis 

 praecocior est,' the dissertations contain the doctrine \ that the 

 flower is nothing but the synchronous appearance of leaves, 

 which properly belong to the bud-formations of six consecutive 

 years, in such a way that the leaves of the bud destined to be 

 unfolded in the second year of the plants become bracts, the 



1 The authority for the contents of these dissertations is Wigand's ' Kritik 

 und Geschichte der Metamorphose' (1846). 



