After Aristotle 61 



relation of flower and fruit. Some plants, he says, ' have 

 [the flower] around the fruit itself as vine and olive ; [the 

 flowers] of the latter, when they drop, look as though they 

 had a hole through them, and this is taken for a sign that it 

 has blossomed well ; for if [the flower] is burnt up or sodden, 

 the fruit falls with it, and so it does not become pierced. Most 

 flowers have the fruit case in the middle, or it may be the 

 flower is on the top of the pericarp as in pomegranate, apple, 

 pear, plum, and myrtle . . . for these have their seeds below 

 the flower. ... In some cases again the flower is on top of the 

 seeds themselves as in ... all thistle-like plants '. 1 Thus 

 Theophrastus has succeeded in distinguishing between the 

 hypogynous, perigynous, and epigynous types of flower, and 

 has almost come to regard its relation to the fruit as the 

 essential floral element. 



Theophrastus has a perfectly clear idea of plant distribution 

 as dependent on soil and climate, and at times seems to be on 

 the point of passing from a statement of climatic distribution 

 into one of real geographical regions. The general question 

 of plant distribution long remained at, if it did not recede 

 from, the position where he left it. The usefulness of the 

 manuscript and early printed herbals in the West was for 

 centuries marred by the retention of plant descriptions pre- 

 pared for the Greek East and Latin South, and these works 

 were saved from complete ineffectiveness only by an occasional 

 appeal to nature. 



With the death of Theophrastus about 287 B.C. pure biological 

 science substantially disappears from the Greek world, and we get 

 the same type of deterioration that is later encountered in other 

 scientific departments. Science ceases to have the motive of 

 the desire to know, and becomes an applied study, subservient 

 to the practical arts. It is an attitude from which in the end 

 applied science itself must suffer also. Yet the centuries that 



1 Historia plantarum, i. 13,111. 



