I20 Plant Description [ch. 



instance, in describing the flower of the Borage he dis- 

 tinguished the green calyx, the corolla with its ligular 

 outgrowths, the five stamens and the central pistil, though 

 naturally he failed to understand the function of the latter 

 organs. He observed that, in the Lily, the calyx was absent, 

 but that the petals themselves showed transitions from 

 green to white. He noticed the early fall of the calyx in 

 the Poppy, and its persistence until the ripening of the 

 fruit in the Rose. On the subject of floral aestivation, his 

 observations were surprisingly advanced. He pointed out 

 that the successive whorls of sepals and petals alternated 

 with one another, and concluded that this was a device for 

 the better protection of the flower. 



Albertus further classified the various forms of flower 

 under three types : — 



1. Bird-form (e.g. Aquilegia, Viola and Lamium). 



2. Pyramid- and Bell-form. 



3. Star-form. 



When we leave the early Aristotelian botanists, and 

 turn to those who studied the subject primarily from the 

 medical point of view, we find a great falling off in the 

 power of description. The accounts of the plants in the 

 Materia Medica of Dioscorides, for example, are so brief 

 and meagre that only those with the most marked character- 

 istics can be identified with certainty. 



The Herbarium of Apuleius Platonicus, the earliest 

 work to which the term " herbal " is generally applied, 

 scarcely makes any attempt at describing the plants to 

 which it refers. Such a paragraph as the following' gives 

 an account of a plant, which, compared with most of the 

 other descriptions in the herbal, may fairly be called precise 

 and full. 



"This wort, which is named radiolus, by another name 

 everfern, is like fern ; and it is produced in stony places, 

 and in old house steads ; and it has on each leaf two rows 

 of fair spots, and they shine like gold." 



The group of late fifteenth-century herbals which we 

 discussed in Chapter II — the Latin and German Herbarius 

 and the Hortus Sanitatis — are alike in giving very brief 



' Quoted from Dr O. Cockayne's translation of an Anglo-Saxon manuscript 

 of the eleventh century. See Appendix II. 



