PHANEKOGAMIA : FLOWERS. 443 



nology. Many as there are who praise or condemn Linnasus, call him 

 great or unintelligent, of all these not one has understood him, not one 

 seen what he really attempted and how he attained it. It was a war 

 against the nomenclature, heaping itself up with nothing but substan- 

 tive words, which he began and happily carried through, by which 

 means he, as with a magic touch, opened a thousand entrances into 

 science previously impassable. A second Linnaaus is indeed very de- 

 sirable, and will be made most necessary by those very people who 

 especially pride themselves on being able to look down upon him. The 

 wiser do indeed admire the artifice of Linnaeus, but continue boldly to 

 make names daily, because they are not in a condition to abstract the 

 universal principle from the isolated cases of the application. Here, as 

 everywhere, it is requisite, in the first place, to discover inductively the 

 various genera of the natural ideas, and these alone are to be named 

 with substantives, their species to be separated by the addition of adjec- 

 tives. This assists a rational investigation of nature, and a rational 

 terminology. In all this manufacture of words, we have in fact learned 

 nothing at all about the fruits themselves ; Botanists who have spread 

 themselves out in every new book with twenty or thirty new Greek 

 names, are often so ignorant of the proper object of their research, that 

 they call the epidermis of the fruit of the Labiates a seed-membrane, 

 derive the cross septum of Punica from the disc, &c. ; and, in a word, 

 manifest everywhere that the study of the Greek language has unfor- 

 tunately left them no time to examine deeply into plants. Consequently 

 we possess so few accurate investigations of the fruit, that it will be long 

 before our knowledge of it will be even in the least endurable ; and there- 

 fore we must so much the more content ourselves with the smallest 

 number of names, because a man must know a thing before he names 

 it scientifically. 



179. The nature of the spermophore has been already discussed 

 at length, and but little remains now to be added. In the first 

 place it is to be remarked, that in the dehiscence of the fruit, 

 portions of cellular tissue are separated from the valves or septa, to 

 which the seeds remain suspended, and which have, indeed, been 

 termed spermophores. Here, again, holds good what has been said 

 of these separations in general, that sometimes actually independent 

 organs become solved from their union with others (as in CrucifercB), 

 and sometimes merely pieces of independent organs become de- 

 tached (as in the Asclepiadacea*). 



It has been already observed with respect to the pulp, that on the 

 one hand it passes into the loose cellular tissue of the pericarp in 

 the true berries (as in Solanum), and on the other into the subse- 

 quent products of the funiculus ; namely, into the aril in its widest 

 sense (in Arum), and probably into the true aril (in Ribes ?). 



The funiculus exhibits manifold varieties, which have already been 

 explained, such as hairs, warty expansions among the seeds, mem- 

 branous, continuous, or lobed envelopes of the seed (arils), and so 

 forth. The hairs of the funiculus form one kind of coma ; the other 

 is a development of the episperm at various places, at the micropyle 

 or the chalaza. The wart-like expansions 011 the seed are termed 

 stropldola or caruncula, but have under these names been mixed up 



