_Pseudo-angina_.--In connexion with angina pectoris, a far more common condition must be mentioned that has now universally received the name of pseudo-angina. This includes the praecordial pains which very closely resemble those of true angina. The essential difference lies in the fact that pseudo-angina is independent of structural disease of the heart and coronary arteries. In true angina there is some condition within the heart which starts the stimulus sent to the nerve centres. In pseudo-angina the starting-point is not the heart but some peripheral or visceral nerve. The impulse passes thence to the medulla, and so reaching the sensory centres starts a feeling of pain that radiates into the chest or down the arm. There are three main varieties:--(1) the reflex, (2) the vaso-motor, (3) the toxic. The reflex is by far the most common, and is generally due to irritation from one of the abdominal organs. An attack of pseudo-angina may be agonizing, the pain radiating through the chest and into the left arm, but the patient does not usually assume the motionless attitude of true angina, and the duration of the seizure is usually much longer. The treatment is that of the underlying neurosis and the prognosis is a good one, sudden death not occurring.
ANGIOSPERMS. The botanical term "Angiosperm" ([Greek: angeion], receptacle, and [Greek: sperma], seed) was coined in the form Angiospermae by Paul Hermann in 1690, as the name of that one of his primary divisions of the plant kingdom, which included flowering plants possessing seeds enclosed in capsules, in contradistinction to his Gymnospermae, or flowering plants with achenial or schizo-carpic fruits--the whole fruit or each of its pieces being here regarded as a seed and naked. The term and its antonym were maintained by Linnaeus with the same sense, but with restricted application, in the names of the orders of his class Didynamia. Its use with any approach to its modern scope only became possible after Robert Brown had established in 1827 the existence of truly naked seeds in the Cycadeae and Coniferae, entitling them to be correctly called Gymnosperms. From that time onwards, so long as these Gymnosperms were, as was usual, reckoned as dicotyledonous flowering plants, the term Angiosperm was used antithetically by botanical writers, but with varying limitation, as a group-name for other dicotyledonous plants. The advent in 1851 of Hofmeister's brilliant discovery of the changes proceeding in the embryo-sac of flowering plants, and his determination of the correct relationships of these with the Cryptogamia, fixed the true position of Gymnosperms as a class distinct from Dicotyledons, and the term Angiosperm then gradually came to be accepted as the suitable designation for the whole of the flowering plants other than Gymnosperms, and as including therefore the classes of Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons. This is the sense in which the term is nowadays received and in which it is used here.