was. I am inclined, however, to believe it to have been much nearer the truth than is generally supposed; judging of it from a comparison of his essential with his artificial generic character, and from an observation recorded in his Prælectiones, published by Giseke.[1]
But the first clear account that I have met with, of the real structure of Pinus, as far as regards the direction, or base and apex of the female flowers, is given, in 1767, by Trew, who describes them in the following manner:— "Singula semina vel potius germina stigmati tanquam organo feminino gaudent,[2] and his figure of the female flower of the Larch, in which the stigmata project beyond the base of the scale, removes all doubt respecting his meaning.
In 1789, M. de Jussieu, in the character of his genus Abies,[3] gives a similar account of structure, though somewhat less clearly as well as less decidedly expressed. In the observations that follow, he suggests, as not improbable, a very different view, founded on the supposed analogy with Araucaria, whose structure was then misunderstood; namely, that the inner scale of the female amentum is a bilocular ovarium, of which the outer scale is the style. But this, according to Sir James Smith,[4] was also Linnaeus's opinion; and it is the view adopted in Mr. Lambert's splendid monograph of the genus published in 1803.
In the same year in which Mr. Lambert's work appeared, Schkuhr[5] describes, and very distinctly figures, the female flower of Pinus, exactly as it was understood by Trew, whose opinion was probably unknown to him.
