:C2 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL.54 



of racemus he says it is the fruit cluster not of the grape only, but 

 also of the ivy and of any kind of herbs or shrubs that have bunches 

 of berries. In practice we shall find him writing of the compactly 

 spicate berries of the arum as forming a racemus. 



As with the ancients, so with Fuchsius the spike is rather more 

 a taxonomic than morphologic term. His definition of it is the 

 most concise of all. "A spike is that which a culm bears at its 

 summit. . . It consists of three parts, grain, glume, and beard. 

 A muticous spike is one that is beardless." Plainly, then, the 

 spike with him is the peculiar inflorescence of grains and their 

 natural allies. The typical form of a spike, that in which as in 

 wheat and barley there is a simple rachis — thyrsus, he would have 

 called it — up and down which the several parts are sessile, is not 

 alone a spike. The one prerequisite of a spike is, that it shall 

 crown the summit of, or at least be connected with, a culm. And so 

 we find him naming as spikes the inflorescences of broom corn,' and 

 also of maize. ^ In modern botany they are panicles. Only thus 

 far, however, does he abide by his own diagnosis of the spike as the 

 fruiting cluster of grass allies ; beyond this point, and lere and there, 

 we find him overstepping the bounds which he himself has set to the 

 application of that term. Lavandula stoechas, an aromatic shrub 

 common in European gardens of that time, is of the family of the 

 labiates, the flowers of which are congested within a somewhat 

 elongated and cylindric involucre of chaffy and overlapping scales. 

 This involucre vividly recalls the head or ear of some short-spiked 

 kind of wheat; and Fuchsius transgresses his definition boldly 

 enough by calling the involucre of this inflorescence a spike.'' In 

 justice to the botanist it must, however, be admitted that he was 

 following popular precedent. The inflorescences of not only this 

 but a number of other labiates had long been called spikes. There 

 is then traceable in Fuchsius a tendency toward a point that was 

 not actually gained until more than two centuries later, of defining 

 terms by morphologic rather than any other characteristics; of 

 naming a raceme from its structure rather than from the fact of its 

 bearing berries and not capsules ; and a spike not as the fructiferous 

 terminal of a culm, but as an axis, bearing up and down its length 

 sessile flowers or fruits, this irrespective of the family of plants in 

 which it may occur. 

 ■ The panicula is almost unique among Fuchsian inflorescences in 



> Hist. Stirp., p. 772. 



2 Ibid., p. 824. 



'Ibid., -p. 777. ' .■ 



