43 
Female ‘Flower ’ in Coniefrae . 
a very rough and ready manner. Their ideas about com¬ 
parative morphology may often seem crude when placed in 
comparison with those of to-day, and as they judged 
primarily by outward appearances when classifying and 
comparing organs, it is small wonder if we find that those 
ideas misled them with regard to many points. 
Long before the middle of the last century Linnaeus (3) 
had already attempted the solution of this botanical puzzle, 
which to-day is as much an enigmatic chaos for the majority 
of students as it was in his, the dawning age of botany. Lin¬ 
naeus considered that the seminiferous scale of Abietineae 
represented a calyx ; that there was no corolla; and that 
each ovule represented a pistil consisting of a very small 
ovary with simple style and stigma which became changed 
when ripe into a winged nut. In Juniper us he describes the 
three exterior scales of the berry as a calyx and the three 
interior as a corolla. 
Jussieu (6), writing towards the close of the same century 
on the female organ of the Abietineae, mentions an outer 
scale bearing two pistils on its base and two glandular 
stigmas ; and an inner scale, formed on ripening of the fruit, 
bearing two one-seeded, winged capsules. His deduction was 
that the bracts were styles from their caducous nature, and 
that the seminiferous scale was a bilocular ovary. 
Mirbel (17,18, 20), at the very beginning of the present cen¬ 
tury, thus describes the female organs of this order : ‘ The 
Pines, Spruces, Larches have female catkins whose flowers, 
hidden in cupules, are inverted so that the stigmas are directed 
towards the axis, and whose broad peduncles, inserted each 
at the base of a bract, become insensibly transformed into 
woody scales, covering the ripe fruits, and forming a cone or 
strobilus by their approximation.’ Here, what the majority 
of botanists now call the ‘ integument ’ is for him a ‘ cupule,’ 
our * nucellus ’ is his c flower,’ and our ‘ seminiferous scale 5 is 
his ‘ peduncle.’ Further : ‘ The Cypresses, the Thujas , the 
Junipers, and Schubertia \Taxodium\ have also a kind of 
catkin. Its axis is very short, its flowers erect, and enclosed 
