The complete flowers (or the florets) and the rays (or partially abortive flowers) form, in their aggregate, what our botanists have agreed to call an _inflorescence of the capitula_. Disposed quincuncially on an ovoid receptacle, or _phoranth_, both are grouped (Fig. 32, _c_) in alternating rows. [Illustration: FIG. 31.] [Illustration: FIG. 32.] To explain thoroughly this species of inflorescence, we will venture upon an hypothesis. Let us suppose that we could elongate the said ovoid receptacle as if it were a ball of wax,--it would be changed into a sheath-like inflorescence; all our smaller florets, whose union composes what is improperly called the _flower_ of the daisy, would be ranged around an elongated, instead of being placed upon a flattened axis. This axis characterises all the Synantheraceæ of the family of the Compositæ (a sub-order); sometimes naked, sometimes garnished with varied hairs, either shrunken or persistent, it has furnished several characters useful in the classification of genera and species. But possessed with a mania for complicating everything, botanists designate it indifferently _receptacle_, _phoranthe_, _clinanthe_, etc. Why not employ one and the same word to distinguish one and the same thing? Why not have preserved the name _axis_, and have attached to it such qualifying terms as might be necessary to indicate simple differences of forms? * * * * * The ancients looked upon nature,--I cannot sufficiently insist upon this theme,--with quite other eyes than we do. The study and description of characters, so indispensable to our classifications and nomenclatures, appeared to them a useless labour; they had not even an idea of its value. But it was of signal importance to them to investigate the virtues and properties of plants, so far as they might be rendered available for the preservation of health and the cure of disease. Our daisy is common in Greece. Theophrastus, therefore, ought to have known it, though he does not refer to it. It is common also in the plains of Italy. Pliny was the first to describe it, under the name of _bellis_; he attributes to it the properties of the St John's wort.[44] And it is noteworthy that the daisy belongs to the same family as the latter; a circumstance certainly not known in the days of Pliny. The botanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are by no means niggards in the eulogiums which they lavish on the medicinal properties of our graceful Synantheracea. Bock (better known, perhaps, under the name of _Tragus_, a Goat), who mistook the yellow anthers for the seeds, recommended the leaves of the _Gänzeblume_ (goose-flower, as he called it) as a laxative. Tabernæmontanus prescribed them as a remedy for cramps in the stomach and the spitting of blood.