LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 



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terms, and to give new meanings to old ones. Most seeds were 

 grown and perfected under some special covering formed to shelter, 

 contain, and nourish them until mature. For particular kinds of 

 such coverings particular names were in common use: pod, husk, 

 chaff, shell, and for succulent or fleshy coverings of seeds pome, 

 berry, acine, or more comprehensively, fruits. A general term which 

 should include all these coverings was needed, and the wor d per i- 

 cajp was coined.^ This done he defines a fruit scientifically. It 

 consists of a pericarp and the seed or seeds which it encloses. 

 Henceforward, while in agriculture, gardening, domestic economy, 

 and the world's commerce a fruit is what it always was, in botany 

 the term has another meaning, a meaning at once more exact and 

 more comprehensive; and it has this new meaning universally, 

 and from Theophrastus forward; for modern botany reiterates it 

 from him, unaltered by a syllable; and that of the future will do 

 the same. In practice he did not always rightly distinguish between 

 pericarp and seed. Lecturing upon the fruit, and having a mature 

 sprig of sage or other labiate in hand, he would have taught that 

 the four black nutlets are the seeds, and that the green calyx is 

 their pericarp. Or with a handful of spikes of wheat or barley 

 before him, he would have mistaken the grains for mere seeds, 

 and the chafE for the pericarps. Errors like these in the mere 

 application of his terms were inevitable. They could never have 

 been corrected without microscopically aided vision; and it was 

 indeed a long, long time after the invention of the microscope that 

 botanists first learned the structure of sage nutlets and wheat grains 

 to be that of fruits and not that of seeds. 



About pericarps he seems to have observed everything that lay 

 before him within his own limited field. He notes the extreme 

 diversity of them, but, as usual with him, and doubtless for want 

 of time to correlate and classify he gives to the most distinctive 

 kinds little more than an informal mention. Only a single de- 

 duction does he venture concerning pericarps in general as unlike 

 other organs, a deduction superficial, curious, geometrical: "No 

 pericarp shows a rectilinear or angular circumscription. " ^ Yet 

 the cursory reader of the main chapter on fruits — perusing it in the 

 Greek original — might well wonder with what justice or propriety 

 it can be said that the philosopher did not carefully and effectively 

 generalize about seed in relation to pericarp, when he finds him 



' Hist., Book i, ch. 3. irepiKipviov was also in use with Aristotle. The 

 invention of it lies between him and Theophrastus. 

 2 Ibid., end of ch. 18. 



