LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY— GREENE 20 1 



of general adoption; and long after Fuchsius, frond came into use 

 as designating the peculiar foliage of, ferns. It must be said of 

 Fuchsius' application of frond that it was the more correct; for 

 frons with the old Latins meant the leaves of trees, or even leafy- 

 twigs of trees, such as, anterior to Theophrastus, and by thousands 

 in later times, the compound leaf was believed to be. 



Inflorescence. The term inflorescence of course did not appear 

 in botany until long after Fuchsius; but the thing had been of 

 necessity both observed and discussed. The using of words de- 

 finitive of the various clusterings of fruits and flowers must be older 

 than history. Perhaps few if any of those defined by the German 

 father were newly coined, or even otherwise applied than they had 

 been in far earlier times. But here in the Historia Stirpium we 

 have a goodly number of them brought together, along with not 

 indefinite statements of what that author understood to be their 

 meanings. And what must vouch for the importance of this para- 

 graph of history is the fact that not one of Fuchsius' terms relating 

 to inflorescence bears with him the meaning which the same term 

 has in the botany of our own time. 



Take the word thyrsus, which at its first origin in Greek and Latin 

 was but a synonym of caulis, any stalk or stem; though later, 

 and still in ancient times, it acquired a special significance; while 

 with botanists of our time it means a particular kind of infloi'es- 

 cence. There is with Fuchsius no kind of a flower clustering that 

 is called a thyrse; yet he essays to define the term as if in the 

 botanical terminology of his time it had gained some new shade of 

 meaning. From his definition itself nothing of the kind is apparent ; 

 but at definition Fuchsius is no adept ; and when he says a thyrsus 

 is a straight wand-like or arrowy stalk he has hardly departed from 

 the earliest of ancient definitions. But when we make search for 

 his practical use of the term we find that it has with him a meaning 

 which he had not indicated or intimated in his definition. In the 

 description of the hyssop he uses the expression: "Flowers 

 purplish-blue, investing the thyrses like a spike."' Here it is plain 

 that the thyrsus is the axis of a spicate inflorescence; that which 

 in much later botany is become the rachis. But it is only now and 

 then that he notes the arrangement of flowers ; though the clustering 

 of fruits is much more frequently taken into account. 



The term racemus occurs not infrequently; but I think only as 

 specifymg the arrangement of some berry-like kinds of fruits. 

 The type of the raceme is the grape-cluster; but in his definition 



< Hist. Stirp., p. 840- 



