2o6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



^.•^, fleshy fruits, rather than a particular mode of clustering in 

 both flowers and fruits. Seed coverings other than fleshy are dis- 

 posed of by him under two or three distinctive terms. There is 

 the silique, the vasculum and the caput as well as its diminutive, 

 the capitulum. The legumes he says are siliques, and yet many 

 other herbaceous plants and even shrubs bear siliques; and we infer 

 his silique to be any kind of an elongated and two- valved pod. 

 He ventures upon no definition of what he calls vascula, beyond 

 this, that they are the coverings of seeds. His account of head 

 and capitulum is, that they apply to any well rounded and solidified 

 part of a plant, whether basal or terminal. An onion-bulb, resting 

 wholly above ground and therefore not a root, is a head, a caput; and 

 so is the head of a cabbage, and also the round indurated capsule 

 of a poppy. If he knew anything of Theophrastus' technical de- 

 finition of a fruit as composed of pericarp and seed, he does not 

 appear to me to have made use of it, or of the term pericarp. 



The seed is not defined in our author's vocabulary, or even 

 mentioned there otherwise than incidentally. 



Phytography. There has already been cited this opinion of 

 phytography from Brunfelsius,' that the best way to reform and 

 improve upon mediaeval plant description would be to restore word 

 for word the descriptions of the ancients. At a later time it was 

 thought — and the thought was carried into action — that the only 

 possibility of improvement in phytography lay in wholly disregard- 

 ing the classic texts, and writing all plant diagnoses anew. Such a 

 I proposal as this last would have filled either Brunfelsius or Fuchsius 

 ! with amazement ; and also not unreasonably, for neither of them 

 had in view the reformation of botany in general. Both were 

 aiming at the correction and improvement of that which we of to- 

 \ day would speak of as the botanical part of the pharmacopeia. 

 They were interested in phytography, because it is one of the necessi- 

 ties of medical botany. The most trying part of their work was 

 that of the identification of ancient remedies; and their only clues 

 to the identity of any of them were in the ancient descriptions. 

 We have followed Brunfelsius in his giving, for some plant newly 

 figured, page after page of different descriptions literally quoted 

 from those whom he regards as standard authors, not willing to 

 divert the attention of the student by a single line of his own; 

 willing that they who study his book shall judge for themselves 

 whether what he has figured under a given Theophrastan, or 

 Dioscoridean, or Plinian name has been rightly identified. 

 ' See page 172 preceding. 



