106 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



era of strongly renewed scientific activity in the sixteenth century, 

 we shall find botanical authors of the time employing many 

 of Theophrastus' descriptions of plant species without altera- 

 tion of any kind; some, like Brunfels, Tragus, and Cesalpino and 

 their class, formally crediting each such diagnosis to its ancient 

 author, others without making such acknowledgment. But 

 they of this period who ventured upon new descriptions of 

 plants which Theophrastus had described of old seem to have 

 exposed themselves to public censure, as needlessly, perhaps ir- 

 reverently, supplanting or amending the excellent work of the 

 father of phytography. 



Taxonomy. To teach, as it has been taught and is still taught, 

 that Tournefort (1694) first ranged the members of the plant 

 world under genera, that Linnaeus (1753) first clearly distinguished 

 species and varieties, and that Adanson (1763) first proposed 

 the grouping of genera into families all this is to inculcate fable. 

 It has been already suggested, and forcibly enough, that plant 

 taxonomy was not invented in any school, or by any philosopher; 

 that it is everywhere as old as language ; that no plant name is the 

 name of an individual plant, but is always the name of some group 

 of individuals, and that all grouping is classifying. Botanical 

 taxonomy began at whatever time far off and prehistoric men 

 began to give names to plants; and it increased with the recog- 

 nition and the naming of new groups always groups, never single 

 plants. Had some earlier Theophrastus appeared upon the 

 scene some thousands of years earlier than this one did, in this 

 particular at least he would have found himself in the midst of a 

 like environment. He would have found some hundreds of kinds 

 of cultivated plants familiarly known, spoken of always under 

 group names. In other phrase, he would have found a certain 

 taxonomy ready to hand, such as answered the needs of those 

 who had to do with plants industrially. 



The real Theophrastus, entering the field, not in the far-off age 

 of Homer, whose poems are full of tree and plant lore, but many 

 hundred years later, had much to do in the first place in acquaint- 

 ing himself with the vast sum of knowledge, of theory, of poetic 

 fancy, and of superstitious fable that was then extant concerning 

 plants. All this he accomplished, as his pages plainly show, 

 and that with the occasional expression of something like the 

 scientific man's impatience of the superstitious and the fabulous. 

 As distinctively a nature student, however, exploiting the realms 

 of nature from the philosopher's viewpoint rather than from that 



