Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/70

as the opinion of Cesalpino also, is shown in his 'Classes Plantarum,' where in describing Cesalpino's system he says: 'He regarded the flower as the interior portions of the plant, which emerge from the bursting rind; the calyx as a thicker portion of the rind of the shoot; the corolla as an inner and thinner rind; the stamens as the interior fibres of the wood, and the pistil as the pith of the plant.' It may be observed however that this was not exactly what Cesalpino says; but it is nevertheless certain that Linnaeus' own view as given in these words was intended to reproduce that of Cesalpino; and if it does not do this exactly, there is no essential difference in principle between the two, Linnaeus' conception being perhaps a more logical statement of Cesalpino's meaning. Cesalpino's doctrine of metamorphosis appears plainly on another occasion also; he says, that we do not find envelopes, stamens, and styles in all flowers; the flowers change in some cases into another substance, as in the hazel, the edible chestnut, and all plants that bear catkins; the catkin is in place of a flower, and is a longish body arising from the seat of the fruit, and in this way fruits appear without flowers, for the styles ('stamina') form the longer axis of the catkin ('in amenti longitudinem transeunt'), while the leafy parts and the stamens are changed into its scales. All this shows that the notion of a metamorphosis, of which we find intimations as early as Theophrastus, was a familiar one to Cesalpino, and it fitted in perfectly with his Aristotelian philosophy, while Goethe's doctrine on the same subject is equally scholastic in its character, and therefore looks strange and foreign in modern science. It has already been observed that Cesalpino includes only the envelopes and stamens under the word flower, and distinguishes the rudiments of the fruit from them; therefore he says that there are plants which produce something in the shape of a catkin, without any hope of fruit, for they are entirely unfruitful; but those which bear fruit have no flowers, as Oxycedrus, Taxus, and among herbs Mercurialis, Urtica, Cannabis, in which