46 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



was confronted at the outset by the roots of plants. These parts 

 are recondite. He who for any purpose would inspect a root must 

 undergo the labor and inconvenience of digging about the plant, 

 wresting that root from its hiding-place, and then cleansing it, 

 so that its characteristics may become visible and tangible. When 

 all is done, there is a great sameness about roots. They do not 

 promise much aid to him who would find marks by which to dis- 

 tinguish between like and unlike. Stems present a much greater 

 diversity, and either leaves or flowers or fruits a hundred times 

 more differences by which to distinguish plants, than do these 

 underground parts. It being granted that the function of the root 

 as a vital organ was thoroughly understood, as it appears to have 

 been from the earliest historic period, still, as regards early de- 

 scriptive botany, there would have been less reason to be surprised if 

 the early fathers had commonly ignored it ; or at best had made as 

 little account of it in their descriptions of species as most of the 

 modern systematists have done. And there must be a philosophy of 

 this very ancient and once universal appreciation of the root as a 

 subject of phytographic notice equally with stem and leaf. The 

 cause must, if possible, be ascertained. 



If the ancestors, even somewhat remote, of the first botanical 

 philosophers had been savages such as, in dearth of animal food, 

 had found the subterranean parts of many a wild plant available 

 in its stead, then would there have been some show of reason for 

 that singular prestige which roots had obtained so almost prime- 

 vally. In the transition from savagery to civilization such root- 

 food plants would have come into cultivation, where they would 

 have held their place and been well known to enlightened posterity. 

 But at the time when writing about plants began, at least with the 

 Greeks and Latins, roots and bulbs constituted but an inconsiderable 

 part of their table fare. The bulk of their farm and garden pro- 

 ducts were the cereals, orchard fruits, pot-herbs, and salads. The 

 ancestry of the philosophers for centuries, possib'y for millenniums, 

 had been highly civilized, perhaps to the degree of having lost the 

 traditions of nomadic life and the feeding upon wild products of 

 the plains and woodlands. 



In this civilization, however, the art of medicine held an im- 

 portant place ; and in this circumstance we have a clew to that pre- 

 dilection for describing so faithfully the roots of everything which 

 is so almost peculiar to the phytography of the ancients and their 

 sixteenth-century imitators. 



Throughout the whole period of Greek antiquity there was a 



