88 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



these and other like trees are flowerless, he tersely contradicts it. 

 " Both oaks and alders flower " ' ; by which he must have meant the 

 axillary and scattered pistils of the oak, and the cone-like clusters 

 into which the alder pistils are congested. 



Of the aments of fir and pine I observe no mention in Theo- 

 phrastus. Even the young cone of pistils with their subtending 

 scales in the conifers, from its form he denominates a julus; but 

 it is not of the enigmatic class. Without hesitation he denominates 

 that the flower. It is also plain that with him this must be re- 

 ceived as a petaliferous or leafy flower, for it shows nothing that 

 could be called a capillamentum. The rudiment of each fruit 

 rests in the axil of an ample and highly colored leaf. ^ Nor does 

 he here cite the opinion of any of his forerunners or contemporaries 

 as having denied or questioned that these are flowering trees, as 

 they had done in the case of oaks and alders and hazels. The 

 flowers of the fig tree he could never discover. To him it was as 

 flowerless as a fern or moss. He was loath to believe that junipers 

 are not equally flowerless. He had investigated them; had observed 

 that in summer their fructiferous branches bear one set of fruits 

 full grown, and another set newly formed and not half grown; a 

 proof that its fruits require a year and somewhat more for their 

 growth and ripening. He can hardly have failed to see the stami- 

 nate aments, small though they be, and of brief duration. They 

 were nothing, in his view; at least nothing floral, and not worth 

 mentioning after he had once described the like phenomenon as 

 conspicuous and of long duration in other trees and shrubs. What 

 he was looking for, he could never find, that is, what he would 

 have accepted as a flower, a folium, or a capillamentum indicating 

 the seat of the juniper berry that is to be. The pistillate or fertile 

 juniper flower is as far away as it is possible to go from having the 

 appearance of a flower at all. It shows even under a lens no 

 trace of style or stigma or ovary. It is so little different from the 

 minutest first rudiment of a merely vegetative twig, that an ex- 

 perienced botanist, even of these later times, may fail to recog- 

 nize it, though[_he search with a lens. It is improbable that there 

 is a man in the world to-day who, in the feeble botanical light of 

 the Theophrastan age, and without the aid of magnifiers, would 

 ever have found the pistillate flower of a juniper. 



' Hist., Book iii, ch. 5. 



2 "The flower of the fir is yellowish red, and otherwise beautiful." — Hist. 

 Book iii, ch. 6. 



