LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 05 



or concealed within their colored floral leaves, are the fruit. From 

 this incipient stage, in which, as I say, we call them parts of the 

 flower, the Greek held them to be the fruit, and so forward to their 

 fuller development and final maturity, always the fruit. Whether, 

 by the way, his doctrine of the fruit or ours is the more natural, 

 the more logical, and the less forced and arbitrary, he may determine 

 who may divest his mind of its every prejudgment about the case. 

 In the light of this explanation it will be easy to see that, if the 

 fruit be denied by Theophrastus its place in the list of plant organs, 

 the flower, that is what we call corolla, is equally disqualified, 

 partly on account of its intimate connection with the fruit, and 

 partly on the score of its exceeding transiency in all cases. Fur- 

 thermore, because in the thought of the Greek the flower itself 

 was but a circle of leaves, different from the ordinary foliage only 

 as to form and coloring, if the floral leaves must fall short of mention 

 in the list of important organs, the green leaves must remain with 

 them. So the catalogue would begin and end thus: root, stem, 

 branch, bud. Indeed, his first presentation of it is in this ab- 

 breviated form. Now against his own argument for the exclusion 

 of such parts from the list, he presents such reflections as the 

 following. It is only when trees stand vested in their full foliage, 

 flowers, and fruits, that they seem to have reached their fullness of 

 beauty and perfection. That which makes for the perfection of 

 an organism should apparently be accounted a part of that or- 

 ganism. And as for permanency, there are exceptional cases among 

 animals in which certain parts are transitory. Fowls periodically 

 shed their feathers, and stags their horns; and his last observation 

 here is that animals and plants are in many ways so very different 

 in their constitution that arguments from analogy must not be 

 pressed too far. And so, after much observation and astute rea- 

 soning upon the subject, he convinces himself that leaf, flower, 

 and fruit are entitled to places in the list of plant organs, where 

 nevertheless they by their nature form themselves into a separate 

 division. One can not but admire this piece of Theophrastan 

 method, wrought out originally and laboriously by himself, and 

 so unique; in its deepest meaning fairly amounting to a division 

 of the organs as vegetative and reproductive, and drawing the 

 line between bud and leaf mistakenly, of course instead of 

 between leaf and flower. 



There is another mark of deep study in the making of this list. 

 It lies there, rather well concealed from our first glance, in that 

 elegant sequence according to which the names of the organs are 



