136 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



months, they had seen come forth in summer, changed to such 

 things as frog and toad. In their simple life, lived very much out 

 of doors, the observingpand intelligent had taken note of how under- 

 ground grub and tree caterpillar by and by assume a larval state, 

 rest in that for months together, and then suddenly are born again, 

 the one as beetle, the other as butterfly. In his environment, the 

 primeval nature student would not doubt the easy possibility, or 

 the apparently strong probability, of some kind of sudden trans- 

 formation in the world of plants; and the well-known frequent ap- 

 pearing of chess in wet ground instead of wheat where only wheat 

 had been planted might be evidence enough of such transmutation. 



That the supreme philosopher of antiquity, the father of animal 

 biology, who knew so nearly everything about metamorphosis in 

 lower animals, also must have investigated the case of the sup- 

 posed transmutations of plants, appears most probable. For 

 this department of botanical history it may be thought partic- 

 ularly unfortunate that Aristotle's botanical writings have not 

 survived. 



Theophrastus does not formally and didactically discuss this 

 question, though he makes a number of references to this changing 

 of one plant into another as something universally believed in his 

 day. I shall reproduce a number of them. 



Recording in one place the usages of his time as to the different 

 seasons of the year and the several methods of sowing cereals, as 

 well as giving a long list of leguminous plants that he names, he 

 concludes the chapter with a remark like this : " None of the 

 above are liable, on account of a bad condition of the seeds, to 

 change into other plants except wheat and barley, which people 

 say may change into darnel (lolium) ; more particularly wheat, 

 and this being said to occur as the result of wet weather, and in 

 muddy places of the fields." 1 In the same connection he records 

 it that "Some think flax also changes into darnel." Quotations 

 like these read much as if the author had been unwilling to take 

 the responsibility of either affirming or denying the proposition. 

 "People say" that such metamorphoses occur. But in another 

 paragraph, one relating to different kinds of wheat as imported into 

 Greece from other parts, he affirms that from Pontus, from Egypt, 

 and from the island of Sicily grain-growers of his time obtain seed 

 wheat which matures crops free from lolium; though that from 

 Sicily comes up infested by a different weed called melampyrum, 



1 Hist., Book viii, ch. 6. 



2 Ibid., ch. 7. 



