to a deeper insight into their nature. The same thing appears from his
notion of ‘hibernaculum,’ by which he understands a part of the plant
which envelopes the stem in its embryonal state and protects it from
harm from without; he here distinguishes bulbs from the winter buds of
woody plants. In this course of mixing up morphological and biological
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: (1) 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
definition and distinction could be given in 1751, and again in 1770,
by the first botanist of his time, when Malpighi and Grew, nearly
a hundred years earlier, had illustrated the parts of the seed and
even the history of its development and its germination by numerous
figures. He does not mention the endosperm, evidently confounding it
with the cotyledon, though Ray had already distinguished it clearly
from the other parts of the seed. Linnaeus’ terminology of the seed
supplies more than sufficient corroboration of our previous remark,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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