Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/124

 remains a naked insect. When the flower is produced in the plant the rind opens and forms the calyx (exactly Cesalpino's view), and from out of this the inner parts of the plant issue to form the flower, so that the bast, the wood, and the pith issue forth naked in the form of corolla, stamens, and stigma. So long as the plant lies concealed within the rind and clothed only with leaves, it appears to us as unrecognisable and obscure as a butterfly, which in its larva-condition is covered with skin and spines.

In this doctrine of metamorphosis, which Linnaeus founded on Cesalpino, the chief point to observe is, that the ordinary leaves are identical with the exterior parts of the flower, because both originate in the outer tissues of the stem. The pertinent fact, which may easily be observed without a microscope, that the concentric arrangement of outer and inner rind, wood, and pith occurs only in some flowering plants, that the case is quite different with Monocotyledons, and that Cesalpino's theory of the flower cannot properly be applied to them, these are things which we must not expect to find Linnaeus with his peculiar modes of thought taking into consideration. The want of firm standing-ground in experience is shown also by the fact, that with his own and Cesalpino's theory of the flower he combined another view of its nature, which under the name of 'prolepsis plantarum' was set forth in two dissertations in 1760 and 1763, but the two theories are scarcely compatible with one another. While the last paragraph in the 'Philosophia Botanica' says, 'Flos ex gemma annuo spatio foliis praecocior est,' the dissertations contain the doctrine, that the flower is nothing but the synchronous appearance of leaves, which properly belong to the bud-formations of six consecutive years, in such a way that the leaves of the bud destined to be unfolded in the second year of the plants become bracts, the