282 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



To the fundamentals of leaf morphology I have not found this 

 author contributing very much that is new; but his descriptions 

 show him always carefully discriminating between the equally and 

 the unequally pinnate in compound leaves. Not that these leaves 

 have yet been formally designated as "compound." They have 

 not been, nor will they be so named until after the lapse of more than 

 a century after Cordus' time. The epoch is one of discovery, not 

 of always naming the thing discovered. 



But Cordus is the man who first reaches' the conclusion that an 

 organ need neither be green colored nor horizontally explanate 

 in order to be a leaf. It seems to have fallen to his lot to describe 

 but two orobanchaceous types. In the case of the first of them it 

 is evident he had not yet seen that the colorless scales investing 

 the base of the stem have the nature of foliage; for he says "the 

 plant is destitute of leaves."' Some years after this, travelling in 

 Italy, he becomes acquainted with another and much more scaly 

 member of this alliance. His opinion respecting what the scales 

 are now undergoes a change. " The dense investiture of scales 

 upon the stems of this plant, all of them pointing vertically, are to 

 be interpreted as being its leaves. "^ 



Anthology. Among botanical authors of his time Cordus alone 

 gives some attention to inflorescence. He is the first after 

 Theophrastus to have noted the distinction of the centripetal and 

 centrifugal in anthesis ; or, to state it otherwise, of the indeterminate 

 and determinate in inflorescence; and every historian of botany 

 appears to have overlooked this. Meyer writing on this topic little 

 more than a half century since says that, in as far as he is aware, 

 all the way from Theophrastus down to the times of Link and 

 Robert Brown, no mention was made of these distinctions.^ Cor- 

 dus' writings antedate those of the worthies last named by almost 

 three centuries; and Meyer can not have taken the time to read 

 them; for it is a very common thing with this German youth, in 

 describing plants spicate or racemose as to their flowering, to say 

 that the expanding of the individual flowers proceeds from base to 

 summit of the axis, and that thus the succession of the flowering is 

 prolonged indeterminately as it were, and may continue indefinitely, 

 through a long season. In the case of loose inflorescences such as 

 the corymb and the umbel he does not make note of such differ- 

 ences. But in the crowded, though quite spherical flower-cluster 



■ Hist. PL, p. 89. 



' Ihid., Book V, p. 5. 



- Meyer, Geschichte der Botanik, vol. i, p. 166. 



