LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 75 



reported facts influenced his decision that these were roots. We 

 shall also see presently that he had noted other morphologic 

 marks, but such as he did not think universal. 



The roots of herbaceous growths he in general classifies as 

 ligneous, fibrous, and fleshy; and these include many things recog- 

 nized in recent botany as subterranean stems, that is bulbs, corms, 

 tubers, and the more thick and fleshy forms of root stock or rhi- 

 zome. All really fleshy underground parts he distinguishes again 

 as vertically elongated, spherical, depressed-globose, and what 

 he calls nut-like; this last class embracing such incongruities as 

 the small and solitary shell-covered corms of the crocus, and those 

 tuberiform enlargements that appear, as if strung like nuts, on the 

 roots of the asphodel. The rhizomes of arundo, and of what he 

 names as arundinaceous plants in general, and which he remarks 

 are sometimes partly above ground, he denominates jointed roots, 

 but notices that these all have fibrous roots attached to them 

 Others, like the bulbs of squill and onion, are composed of a multi- 

 plicity of scales or tunics which can be removed one by one; so 

 that these differ from other fleshy roots in that they exhibit two 

 different kinds. Their nature is so peculiar that one might be 

 excused for doubting that they are roots at all; for if in that they 

 are subterranean they would at first seem to be such, they are in 

 other particulars of quite another nature; because roots properly 

 so-called diminish in size toward their lower extremity and end 

 there acutely, whereas these bulbs and their like are widest at 

 base and grow smaller in the opposite direction; moreover those 

 fibres which descend from the bases of some and from the sides of 

 others are the real roots which take up aliment ; but the extuberant 

 part is more like a foetus, or a fruit. 1 However, after still further 

 discussion, he seems to rest in the conclusion that, as roots are of 

 various kinds, and even bulbs and other fleshy roots are functionally 

 much alike, all may well enough be continued under the category 

 of roots. If to any botanists of the twentieth century it may 

 seem a strange thing that the Greek, having distinguished between 

 roots as subterranean and aerial, should have failed and after 

 all his study of them to classify stems also as aerial and sub- 

 terranean, let them recall to mind that philosophic conservatism 

 which led Theophrastus to make more of the function of an organ 

 than of its form; that he was sure that corm and rhizome and 

 tunicated bulb attract nutriment and are by that token roots. 



i Hist., Book i, ch. 10. 



