Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/116

 relations of organs he was followed by botanists till late into our own century.

Linnaeus goes far beyond his predecessors in distinguishing and naming the organs of fructification, the subject of the fourth chapter of the 'Philosophia Botanica.' The fructification, he says, is a temporary part in plants devoted to propagation, terminating the old and beginning the new. He distinguishes the following seven parts: (i) the calyx, which represents the rind, including in this term the involucre of the Umbelliferae, the spathe, the calyptra of Mosses, and even the volva of certain Fungi, another instance of the way in which Linnaeus was guided by external appearance in his terminology of the parts of plants; (2) the corolla, which represents the inner rind (bast) of the plant; (3) the stamen, which produces the pollen; (4) the pistil, which is attached to the fruit and receives the pollen; here for the first time the ovary, style, and stigma are clearly distinguished. But next comes as a special organ (5) the pericarp, the ovary which contains the seed. As bulbs and buds were treated not simply as young shoots, but as separate organs, so here too the ripe fruit is regarded not merely as the developed ovary, but as a special organ. Nevertheless, Linnaeus distinguishes the different forms of fruit much better than his predecessors had done. (6) The seed is a part of the plant that falls off from it, the rudiment of a new plant, and it is excited to active life by the pollen. The treatment of the seed and its parts is the feeblest of all Linnaeus' efforts; he follows Cesalpino, but his account of the parts of the seed is much more imperfect than that of Cesalpino and his successors. The embryo is called the 'corculum,' and two parts are distinguished in it, the 'plumula' and the 'rostellum' (radicle). The cotyledon is co-ordinated with the 'corculum,' and is regarded therefore not as part of the embryo but as a distinct organ of the seed; it is defined as 'corpus laterale seminis bibulum caducum.' Nothing could be worse, and it seems almost incredible that so bad a