70 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



one that indeed looked in the direction of a widening of the field 

 of botanical investigation, and was therefore of promise for the 

 future of the science; but it must have given occasion for carping 

 critics to ask how wild plants, such as have neither names nor 

 history, are entitled to a place in the History of Plants. But while 

 this newly suggested distinction had within itself one element that 

 would eventually accomplish its obliteration, Theophrastus did 

 not perceive this. Among wild trees and other growths which it 

 had been sought to introduce into gardens, there were some which 

 had baffled every effort to transfer them, whether by root or seed. 

 From this he reasoned that there existed a line of natural demar- 

 cation, at least between plants that were susceptible of domestica- 

 tion and such as were not. But some trees which he named as 

 apparently impossible of domestication are now successfully 

 cultivated. 



Having held the status of an acceptable part of botanical method 

 for a millennium and a half, at the revival of botany in the first part 

 of the sixteenth century this distinction began to decline in 

 popular favor, and within two centuries more it became so nearly 

 obsolete that, in books descriptive of the plants of particular 

 regions or districts, those of field and garden were wholly omitted. 

 Only wild plants were now taken note of; and so an extreme 

 squarely opposite to that of Theophrastan times had been reached. 

 And what lends deeper interest to these observations now, is the 

 circumstance that of late years there has been awakened the keen- 

 est passion for the study of cultivated plants that history has 

 known. I speak, of course, of that purely philosophic and scientific 

 investigation of them which' either together with or apart from the 

 industrial in motive, engages the attention of many botanists. 

 And here, realizing that the very father of written botany was 

 chiefly attentive to domesticated growths, and upon these as prin- 

 cipal subjects wrought out his scientific system, one wonders 

 whether or not in botany the first cycle of its history is being 

 completed. 



From yet another outlook over the vegetable kingdom as a 

 whole, all the subjects thereof range themselves under the two 

 assemblages of the ' ' flowering ' ' and the ' ' flowerless ' ' . Theophrastus 

 records this ; but assuredly the invention of such a division cannot 

 be ascribed to him. It must have formed a part of the universal 

 prehistoric botany. Never since human intelligence came into the 

 world, and lived in converse with nature, can people have failed 

 to remark the presence here, and the absence there, of those differ- 



