LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 2S; 



account of what is now called the calyx in that species. " Beneath 

 the flower itself there are five very small leaves within which the 

 flower before it opens is enclosed. "^ Certainly that which envelops 

 a flower before its expansion can be no part of that flower. There 

 is here a more than whispered call for a new extension of the use of 

 the word flower; a new definition of that organ, by the terms of 

 which the calyx shall be recognized as a part of it. All this will 

 come, but by no means speedily. 



There is one use of the term calyx frequent with Cordus which 

 practically implies chorisepaly. I refer to his habitual writing 

 of the involucres subtending the flower heads of all cichoriaceous 

 plants and some of the true composites as the calyx. This was 

 a complying with the terms of the then accepted definition of a 

 calyx as that which enfolded at first the flower, after that the fruit. 

 As a somewhat special application of the term this, perhaps intro- 

 duced by Cordus, seems strongly to have commended itself to 

 future generations; for, long after the "flower" of chicory and its 

 cognates had been seen to be an inflorescence, this term calyx 

 remained in use instead of involucre. With Tournefort in 1700 

 it was still a calyx. Linnaeus a half century later modified the 

 expression in so far as to write it " calyx communis " ; but this need- 

 ful modification was afterwards ruled out. A number of prominent 

 botanists, even down to the middle of the nineteenth century, wrote 

 down the involucre even of the sunflowers as a calyx, and the bracts 

 composing it, as sepals. 



To the morphology of the corolla — if one may use that term in 

 writing about a time which far antedates the term's invention — 

 Cordus adds a few items of high import to phytography. Botany 

 has now not many expressions which it could as hardly do without 

 as the terms papilionaceous and bilabiate ; for they at once recall, and 

 respectively designate, two large and important families of plants. 

 Fuchsius in one instance speaks of a certain " flower" as having the 

 form of a butterfly. ^ In as far as I have been able to discover 

 the idea of comparing the pea blossom to a butterfly originated with 

 Fuchsius' brilliant contemporary Conrad Gesner.^ Neither of these 

 appears to have used the expression "flore papilionis forma" in 

 connection with any more than the single species Pisum sativum; 

 but this evidently suggested to Cordus the possibility of something 

 better than the antique usage of describing a vetch blossom as 



« Hist. PL, p. IS3- 



• Hist. Stirp., p. 628, under Pisitm (iS4a). 



> Historia Plantarum, p. 192 (iS4i)- 



