114 FAMILIAR TREES 
ing in front of one of the sepals, are the four awl- 
shaped stamens which spread outward and upward, 
springing from beneath a honey-secreting ring-shaped 
glandular disk which surmounts the ovary. In the latter 
alone do we have a departure from the symmetrically 
alternating whorls of four, the two chambers of which 
it consists, each representing a carpel, being placed 
with their midribs and seed-bearing placentas in 
front of the sepals and stamens of what is termed the 
median plane—a plane passing from back to front of 
the blossom through the bract in the axil of which 
the flower springs. 
Though its congener, the Cornelian Cherry (Cornus 
mas L.), is mentioned by Homer, Virgil and Theo- 
phrastus, the earliest botanical history of our hedge- 
row shrub is not quite so clear. As Parkinson puts 
it, “There is much doubt and question among many ot 
our later writers about this female Cornell, whether 
it should be the Virga sanguinea of Pliny, or the 
Hartriegell of Tragus, or his Faulbauwm, some refer- 
ring it to the one, some to the other, but the general 
tenet of the most is, that in most things it answereth 
both to the Thelycrania of Theophrastus, and may 
well enough agree with the Virga sanguinea of 
Pliny.” 
It must be explained that Thelycrania is the 
Greek equivalent for Corn'us fo'mina, since kranon 
or krania are the old Greek names of the Cornelian 
Cherry, names connected with a root signifying hard- 
ness, just as the Latin cornus is most probably 
connected with cornu, a horn, with reference to the 
horny texture of the wood of one species. Zhe'lus 
