LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 



of the economist, it would not have been strange had he invented 

 some new taxonomic scheme of his own, and then, thrusting aside 

 all the commonly accepted plant groupings, had sought to install 

 an entirely new system of taxonomy in place of the old. 1 He did 

 nothing of the kind; and if he did not, it may have been for the 

 excellent reason that that already in vogue, when duly examined, 

 to a great degree commended itself to the philosophic judgment 

 as having been deduced from nature, and that in as far as it had 

 progressed, was often well enough done. Parts of it could not be 

 amended, and, we may now say confidently, were destined to accept- 

 ance as sound taxonomy as long as the world of plants should 

 endure, or a botanist remain to study it; at many points it might 

 be amended or added to, and the whole must be extended and 

 variously improved. 



We may assure ourselves by a study of Theophrastus, that 

 something very like this was the task to which he addressed himself 

 as regards the classification of plant organs and the systematization 

 of p ants themselves ; and the careful reader of his chapters will 

 note often his great conservatism his manifest aversion to startling 

 the good public by pronouncements that are new, and that will 

 openly antagonize them as assailing their old doctrines and their 

 deeply ingrained prejudices. 



All these things being true, one ascertains with difficulty, if at 

 all, what the historian is most in need of knowing, namely where 

 this writer of the first book of botany is recording points of tax- 

 onomy that are of prehistoric discovery and universal traditional 

 acceptance, and where he is introducing some amendment or 

 improvement of his own. For example, in a very early chapter 

 of his work Theophrastus ranged all the plants that he had ever 

 seen, or heard, or read about, under the four primary groups of tree, 

 shrub, half-shrub, and herb Sivdpov, Octavos, (ppvyavov, Ttoa. 2 

 It is one of the most classic pieces of plant taxonomy; one that 

 stood the test of all the ages and is immortal. Nothing that by 

 any means could be elicited from out the hazy past would be of 

 deeper botanical interest than information as to whether this 

 fine piece of taxonomic work had been handed down in its com- 

 pleteness to Theophrastus, or whether as he gives it it represents 

 much augmentation, or condensation, or finishing and perfecting 

 accomplished for it by himself. We have met with like pro- 



1 This is almost precisely what Tournefort undertook to do in the seven- 

 teenth century, and Linnaeus again in the eighteenth. 



2 Hist., Book i, ch. 5. 



