82 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



stem or any part of it. He observes that most leaves have an 

 upper face and a lower. The upper, exposed to the sun, he notes 

 as being of a deeper green and smoother; the lower face is paler, 

 roughened by the greater prominence of the veins, and apt to be 

 pubescent. 1 From the fact that the lower face of leaves when 

 pubescent is found to be moist he says it has been inferred that it 

 absorbs nutriment and feeds the rest of the leaf. This he confi- 

 dently declares to be erroneous, affirming that all parts of a leaf 

 are fed by way of the veins and fibres which are carried to every 

 part, and which he knows to be connected with the bark. This 

 was the thing which he could easily demonstrate and prove. The 

 other proposition was not in his day demonstrable; for he could 

 not know either the structure of a plant hair, or the existence of 

 stomata. Theophrastus, like his class in all ages, is likely to be 

 correct in that which he affirms, and wrong as to that which he 

 denies. 



Anthology. Without any understanding of flowers as organs of 

 sex, and quite in the dark as to their significance in the economy 

 of plant life, Theophrastus applied himself assiduously to the study 

 of their morphology, and that with a measure of success compelling 

 the admission that he is the founder of anthology; for several of 

 his distinctions remain fundamental in the anthology of to-day, 

 notwithstanding that the theory of the flower has been completely 

 revolutionized within the modern period. 2 And his success is the 

 more remarkable because of his having made his researches at a 

 time when, for mere lack of optical equipments, the discovery of 

 the functions of the essential floral organs was impossible. 



From ages antedating all history cultivators must have ob- 

 served that in such trees, garden shrubs, and herbaceous field 

 crops as flower conspicuously, no fruit or seed develops but as an 

 aftergrowth from the flower; that a young tree never fruits until 

 after having for the first time flowered, and that any mischance 

 befalling the flowers of the tree in their season extinguishes, for that 

 year, all hope of fruit. Upon a considerable array of facts of this 

 kind, the first philosophic investigator who came along might 

 naturally propound such a theory as this, that wherever there is 

 now a fruit or seed, at some time there must have been a flower; 

 a proposition which the cultivators at once and with one voice 

 would have disputed; for in the husbandry of antiquity no tree 

 was more esteemed, nor any more familiarly known than the fig 



1 Hist. Book i, ch 16. 



2 Namely, by Sebastian Vaillant, De Stnictura Florum, Paris, 1717. 



