Il8 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



sisting between Plantago major and an Alopecurus or a Phleum 

 will seem crude enough; and this partly because parallel- veined 

 leaves do not indicate to a certainty that a plant is an endogen 

 and therefore more or less allied to grasses, and partly because we 

 with our hand lenses and microscopes perceive between the small 

 apetalous flowers of Plantago and Alopecurus marked differences 

 that were impossible of discovery by Theophrastus. But the one 

 thing noteworthy is that the Greek thus makes flower and inflor- 

 escence the criterion of natural relationship . He does not positively 

 affirm it. It was but a pointed suggestion; and the suggestion 

 passed unheeded during seventeen centuries. 



The true hellebore and the veratrum are not more closely allied 

 than are alopecurus and plantago, but as to their flowers and more 

 particularly as to their follicular fruits, there is a strong likeness 

 between them. It may have been this circumstance which, along 

 with their powerful medicinal qualities, led to their being named 

 as of the same genus, Helleborus.^ 



More signally indicative of his regard for fruit characters as 

 sometimes taxonomically outweighing the vegetative, is the fact 

 of his having associated the yellow water lily with the poppies, 

 rather than with nelumbo. Having given account of the wild 

 poppies of the grain fields and stony uncultivated lands, he who 

 is so apt to treat of plants in ecologic groups proceeds now to speak 

 of the poppy "that is called nymphsea."^ Evidently its milky 

 juice, the generalities of its floral structure, and above all the 

 external form and the inner structure of the capsule, as well as the 

 seeds themselves, constrained him to think of this and the poppies 

 as congeneric. Also when this same chapter ends with an account 

 of Aristolochia, the capsules of which are so much like those of 

 poppies, one can assign no other reason for it than that by their 

 fruits he guessed that Papaver and Aristolochia were interrelated. 

 Other like instances need not be cited; though it should not here 

 be lost sight of that his families, the Umbelliferse and the Carduacese, 

 were in his mind characterized each by marks of flower and fruit. 

 And so, when the antho-carpologic doctrine of affinities is traced to 

 its beginning, one no longer may think of it as having originated 

 with Cesalpino. The idea had been suggested to his mind, and 

 most impressively, by Theophrastus. 



Nomenclature. No such thought as that of botanical nomen- 

 clature finds expression with the Greek. When he wrote of any 



' Hist., Book ix, ch. ii. 

 2 Ibid., ch. 13. 



