LANDMARKS OP BOTANICAL HISTORY— GREENE 285 



The presentation of his views about calyxes in solanaceous plants 

 will be helped by a list of the genera which at that period, over 

 and above Hyoscyamus, were in German gardens. They were 

 Solanum, Atropa, Mandragora, Melongena, Physalis, Capsicum 

 and Stramonium, or Datura. The last had been credited with a 

 calyx by Tragus, though not technically, or as being an organ 

 regularly so named, but only as a cup-shaped green thing forth 

 from which ' ' the flower proceeds. ' ' ' The corresponding part of the 

 plant Physalis Fuchsius had described collectively as "rounded 

 pouches resembling bladders, "^ and Tragus calls them simply " blad- 

 ders."^ These I think are all the references made by Fuchs and Bock 

 to anything like a calyx in their eight or nine solanaceous genera. 

 Of course the small, flat, hardly more than disk-like calyxes of proper 

 solanum, mandragora, capsicum and their like, would not be noticed 

 by them in any way. They were no part of the flower, nor had any 

 significancy. With Valerius Cordus every one of them — the tubi- 

 form cup of Datura, the globiform-inflated and closed bladder of 

 Physalis, the prickly saucer-shaped thing holding the mere base of a 

 melongena fruit, and the almost flat green disk visible at the basal 

 end of a pepper pod — is a "calix" or "caliculus." This was a 

 most significant innovation; the employment of an old term in such 

 wise as to make of it a strictly scientific term. Hitherto "calyx " had 

 been used in botany from the remotest times as signifying any 

 organ that happened to be cup-shaped, the ovary of a pear or quince 

 or pomegranate in their early stages, a cup-shaped corolla, the cup- 

 shaped corona within the perianth of a jonquil or daffodil, or even an 

 operculate dry seed-vessel. Any one of these was a "calyx" in 

 pre-Cordian terminology. Now, according to this use of the term, 

 which makes its first appearance in Cordus' descriptions of solana- 

 ceous plants, calyx is not calyx by reason of its shape, but because 

 it holds always one and the same place-relation to "flower" and 

 to the fruit that succeeds the flower. This principle of the location 

 of an organ, the place which it visibly occupies as next some other 

 organ, rather than its form or coloring or texture, is one which, 

 long after Cordus' day came to be received a absolutely fundamen- 

 tal in anthology. Morphologically considered the whole doctrine of 

 the flower, as almost every reader will know, rests on this basis, 

 and most securely. Therefore Cordus' mere application of this 

 principle to the identifying of calyx in all its extremes of form 



» Tragus, p. 896. 

 a Fuchs, p.88i. 

 ' Tragus, p. 304. 



