98 SMITHSONIAN' MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



occur in other parts besides stem and branches in leaves, or even 

 in fruits. 



Now if the history of plant anatomy is to begin as near its 

 true beginning is possible, those three Greek terms must be con- 

 sulted which come into our language as bark, wood, and pith. 

 The first two will not detain us. The bark and wood are, each in 

 many different ways, too indispensably necessary to primal man, 

 to have failed to be distinguished and named long before the 

 advent of the most primitive philosophies. Theophrastus took 

 the terms cp\oiog and v\ov as he found them, ready to hand 

 and well suited to his use. It was otherwise with the term which 

 he selected by which to indicate the pith of plants. This part 

 was not well known. Primal man, in quest of only the obvious 

 and the useful in nature, may have been unaware of the existence 

 of it. Woody growths, in that mature condition in which they 

 supply the savage and the half-civilized with timber, fuel, bast, 

 and dye-stuffs, show no pith. But that enlightened and philosophic 

 inquiry into nature's obscure things, which Greeks had begun to 

 pursue before Theophrastus' time, had brought to notice this part 

 of plants which was not bark, neither wood. The philosophic must 

 have discussed the substance, perhaps had written about it, for 

 they had attempted to name it. This we have from Theophrastus 

 himself, who says that some called it the heart of plants, others 

 called it the marrow. 1 In this connection he did what with him 

 is most unusual, almost timorously conservative man that he 

 was; he declined to accept either "heart" or "marrow" as a 

 suitable name for this part of a plant. This can mean nothing 

 else but that he himself had taken the pith under special in- 

 vestigation and thereby had reached a new conclusion ; had found 

 that it was in no important point analogous to marrow, and 

 farther still from corresponding to the heart in animals. AVe 

 know enough about Theophrastus' temperament to warrant the 

 assertion that he would have been the last of men to reject two 

 names already in use for a thing, until he was able to prove that 

 both were utterly false to nature. The new name which even- 

 tually he offered is one which can not have suggested itself from 

 any study of the substance in that dry, whitened, imponderous, 

 and effete condition in which it is seen in mature stems and branches, 

 in which condition alone we of to-day call it pith. As philosopher, 

 and as one whom we, if he had lived in our time, should have 



' Hist., Book i, ch. 4. 



