56 Greek Biology 



terms, and there are cases in which he seeks to give a special 

 technical meaning to words in more or less current use. Among 

 such words are carpos = fruit, pericarpion = szed vessel = peri- 

 carp, and metra, the word used by him for the central core 

 of any stem whether formed of wood, pith, or other substance. 

 It is from the usage of Theophrastus that the exact definition 

 of fruit and pericarp has come down to us. 1 We may easily 

 discern also the purpose for which he introduces into botany 

 the term metra, a word meaning primarily the zuomb, and the 

 vacancy in the Greek language which it was made to fill. 

 ( MetraJ he says, ' is that which is in the middle of the wood, 

 being third in order from the bark and [thus] like to the 

 marrow in bones. Some call it the heart (xapStaz^), others the 

 inside (evTepuoviii*), yet others call only the innermost part 

 of the metra itself the heart, while others again call this 

 marrow.'' He is thus inventing a word to cover all the 

 different kinds of core and importing it from another study. 

 This is the method of modern scientific nomenclature which 

 hardly existed for botanists even as late as the sixteenth century 

 of our era. The real foundations of our modern nomenclature 

 were laid in the later sixteenth and in the seventeenth century 

 by Cesalpino and Joachim Jung. 



Theophrastus understood the value of developmental study, 

 a conception derived from his master. ' A plant ', he says, 

 ' has power of germination in all its parts, for it has life in 

 them all, wherefore we should regard them not for what they 

 are but for what they are becoming.' 3 The various modes of 

 plant reproduction are correctly distinguished in a way that 

 passes beyond the only surviving earlier treatise that deals in 



It is possible that Theophrastus derived the word pericarp from Aris- 

 totle. Cp. De anima, ii. i, 412 b 2. In the passage TO $uAXoi> TrepiKapniov 

 (TKfTTacr^d, TO de nepiKitpTnoi' wipTrov, in the De anima the word does not, 

 however, seem to have the full technical force that Theophrastus gives to it. 



.2vi, 3 Ibid.i, i,iv, " 



