LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE f 99 



sius' time as it is in ours; and second, that the stem-like cylinder 

 surmounting onion, leek, and daffodil bulbs must have been ex- 

 amined in cross section and found completely destitute of every 

 characteristic of stems in general; discovered to be made up of 

 nothing else but the compacted bases of the leaves themselves. It 

 looked much like a stem. Investigation proved it wanting every 

 claim to that title ; and they named it cervix, the ' ' neck" of a grow- 

 ing bulb. The word was not destined to a permanent place in the 

 vocabulary of the science. When at length it came to be seen 

 that the bulb itself, as well as the cervix, was also but a mass of 

 leaf-bases, and therefore no root at all, the term lost its particular 

 significancy and disappeared. And this verj' fact of the invention 

 of a new word that seemed to be called for, and its later passing 

 into desuetude, is an interesting kind of episode in the history of 

 morphology, and well merits notice in a place like this. We shall 

 meet with other instances. 



Respecting that more marked phase of underground stem, the 

 rhizome, or rootstock, Fuchsius appears quite securely to rest in a 

 position which Theophrastus had held with wavering. Fuchsius 

 denominates them all radices geniculates. The Greek had realized 

 that they have rather too much in common with stems. 



In his treatment of stems in general, one observes in Fuchsius 

 some divergencies from, even here and there some little advance 

 ment beyond, the status of these things in the minds of the ancient 

 authors. The word culmus, modified from the Greek calamos, is 

 his term for the stems of grass-like plants. The first and largest, 

 divisions of tree trunks are denominated brachia, arms, though not- 

 unless such diverge from one another rather strongly, suggesting, 

 as he says, ai'ms of the human body when extended. Others had 

 always noted what they called the knots, or nodes, of stems. Fuch- 

 sius uses, and even defines, the good term internodium, intemode; 

 though I much doubt his having invented it. He also observes 

 in trees and shrubs the occasional development of long and vigorous 

 shoots from trunks and main stems ; points at which branching is 

 unusual if not abnormal. He names such shoots adnates. Botany 

 still recognizes this class, and knows them as adventitious shoots, 

 from adventitiously formed buds. 



One reads in this author and in others of his time of such things 

 as the alas of stems. The usual meaning of alae is wings, as of 

 a bird; but in ancient Latin the term also meant the armpits; and 

 quite like this is the sixteenth-century use of it in botany. Fuchsiuf 

 defines the alae of stems as being a kind of sinuses from which new 



