How appropriate the quote by Marlene Dietrich ["You're a mess, honey"] with which you began "The Library Center" in the March/April issue. Very often those words crossed my mind whenever I was forced to pass the Bank Center.
The Colonial Trust had been the venerable institution where my father, Reverend David Messeroff, once proudly banked his depression salary—grateful remuneration for his services at the small synagogue that had invited him to Pittsburgh from Rumania.
As a former librarian at Pitt's School of Information Sciences, I am especially delighted with the illustrative details you use in your description of layout and design. I am very sorry my husband Bill is not here to read it and also see the building come to life. He helped Point Park secure funds at a rough time in its history, and he also taught public relations there part-time.
Thank you so much for your excellent and skillful, well-timed article!
Gert Mazefsky (Mrs. Wm.)
In the May/June issue, "The Strawberry: A Multiple Fruit" contains a bit of botanical misinformation. The strawberry is not a multiple fruit but rather an aggregate fruit with accessory tissue. A multiple fruit is derived from multiple flowers (e.g. pineapple, mulberry), whereas an aggregate fruit is derived from a single flower. A strawberry develops from a single flower with numerous ovaries and accessory receptacular tissue. "Multiple fruit" is not a traditional loose and/or fuzzy term, and I don't know of any authoritative work that has defined it such that it would apply to the strawberry.
Robert Kiger
Director, Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation
Dr. Kiger and also Carnegie botanist Dr. Fred Utech objected to calling the strawberry a multiple fruit in the May/June Kitchen Theater column, which I reviewed. They suggested that the more appropriate term for a strawberry is "aggregate" fruit. Such disagreement among scientific colleagues over what to call different kinds of fruits is not surprising given the long history of imprecise and confusing terms applied to these structures.
Both "multiple" and "aggregate," as well as other words, have been used by different authors for fruits derived from separate ovaries of a single flower since the early 1800's (The Botanical Review, Vol. 55, pages 53–72, 1989). In reviewing the Carnegie Magazine article on strawberries, I discovered that the terminology applied to these types of fruits, which include strawberries, is still quite confusing and at times contradictory among even basic botanical texts!
Fortunately for botanists and others who are interested in knowing exactly what kind of fruit they are eating, there is an authoritative publication on this issue, entitled "A Systematic Treatment of Fruit Types" which was written by Richard Spjut, while a researcher for the USDA Agricultural Research Service, and published by the New York Botanical Garden (Memoirs of the NYBG, Vol. 70, 1994). This 181-page work classifies and illustrates different types of fruits based on examination of plant specimens and a thorough literature review. Spjut drops the term "aggregate" altogether and cites the strawberry as an excellent example of one type of multiple fruit, the "glandetum."
Scientists communicate through the use of an ever-evolving language, which strives to achieve consistency and precision. Sometimes, as in this case, this results in words taking on different meanings from those which were learned many years ago. Fruit terminology was in great need of a worker such as Spjut, who saw the confusion and has produced a major work precisely stating the logic and reasons behind the names given to different fruit types. In order for science to move forward, scientists must be willing to adopt new concepts and to modify long-held ideas. We now have a comprehensive work on fruit types and based on this work we can state that apples are pomes, green beans are legumes, a fig is a syconium, and the strawberry is, in fact, a multiple fruit.
Sue Thompson
Assistant Curator, Botany
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
In the May/June issue, the 1802 stone pile mentioned in the article about the Buildings of Western Pennsylvania book is at Greersburg Academy in Beaver County. In addition, architectural historian Franklin Toker will write the chapter on Allegheny County.