LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 25 



to it are his own and new; because no writer in ancient times was 

 more careful than he to attribute to their proper authors any new or 

 remarkable opinions which met with his own approval. But, that 

 the primeval understanding of the root was that which I have sup- 

 posed is again attested by its universal prevalence in our own time 

 among people who have not been initiated into, or influenced by, 

 the botany taught in our schools. Such peoples, dwelling in all 

 parts of the world, if engaged in farming or gardening hold to a 

 certain classification of farm products, and are wont to speak of 

 grain crops, root crops, etc., using the last named expression with- 

 out ever a suspicion that a potato is a kind of branch, and an onion 

 a kind of bud. Beyond doubt a very great majority of the in- 

 habitants of the earth to-day, if questioned upon the matter, would 

 answer promptly, and fearless of contradiction, that whatever 

 part of a plant grows beneath the soil is its root ; and if any remotely 

 domiciled rustic between Nova Scotia and Patagonia should re- 

 mark that a white potato is a tuber and that onions are not roots 

 but bulbs, we should know without parley that his abandonment 

 of the principles of primeval plant organography had been brought 

 to pass under the influence of modern book or school. 



The survival of these primitive notions about the subterranean 

 organs is more interesting than the origin of those notions. The 

 tardiness of their displacement by a more rational organology is to 

 my mind one of the curiosities of botanical history. That most 

 complicated and difficult of organs, the flower, began to be well 

 understood as early as the dawn of the eighteenth century; but 

 at a time when, by the aid of better microscopes, the important 

 function of stamens had been brought to light, and the doctrine 

 of the flower thereby revolutionized and nearly perfected, it still 

 remained that the rhizomes of iris, the bulbs of lilies and tulips, and 

 the corms of crocuses were called roots by all the botanists; this 

 also some two thousand years after Theophrastus of Eresus had 

 suggested that it might not be very good organology. And as for 

 our historians, I have not found with one of them any intimation 

 of who it was who at last solved for us the hard problem of an 

 acceptable definition of a stem; the definition which at once com- 

 pelled the recognition of subterranean stems as being stems, not 

 roots. In my view this has always appeared to be one of the most 

 signal triumphs of organographic research. Using the term under- 

 standingly and comprehensively, organography is more than half 

 of botany. It is the whole foundation and framework of the 

 science, and a good deal more than that. The progress of botany 



