LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 23 



objects at first sight.' When one notes the perfect silence of the 

 historians as to the possible origin of the most common and uni- 

 versal botanic terms, one seems forced to conclude that they ac- 

 cepted this doctrine of the sudden and inspirational derivation 

 of them; and that then, as if unwilling to say so, they evaded 

 the subject by going about the completely different and really 

 quite irrelevant task of cataloguing the trees, shrubs, and herbs 

 mentioned in the Bible, giving them the appellations due them 

 according to the nomenclature of Linnaeus' Species Plantarum. 

 This was all a mere matter of giving the Linnagan Latin names of 

 certain plants in place of their more ancient Hebrew names. It 

 was not approaching by so much as one step the origin of botany, 

 but rather, as I have said, evading the search. 



Assuming that the simplest and most universally employed botanic 

 terms entered into human speech not all at once by sudden and 

 supernatural illumination of one particular mind, but one after 

 another as a part of the natural and gradual evolution of language, 

 it will be conceded that they had been formed and in use during long 

 ages of human existence that preceded the invention of writing. 

 And the chief botanical interest attaching to very early writings will 

 be, not in that they furnish a few score Hebrew or Greek names of 

 plants which the well skilled botanist of a recent period may trans- 

 late into the terms of modern nomenclature; it will be in this, first 

 of all, that they incidentally record names of some plant organs. 

 Such words as fruit, seed, branch, leaf, and root occur, and these 

 seem to reveal it that plants in numbers have been looked into and 

 studied organologically, and with such success that these names of 

 different parts of trees and herbs are already an indispensable and a 

 firmly settled part of every language. Moreover, the terms tree 

 and herb, grass and grain tell as plainly another story, that of a pre- 

 historic distributing of plants in groups according to resemblances. 

 These two kinds, or at least two phases, of botany are in the writings 

 of Moses and of Homer, and perhaps more valuable because there 

 only incidentally, that is, without botanical thought or purpose 

 in the minds of the writers themselves. They only happen to 

 give us, as through a window accidentally left open, a view in which 

 we see individual plants consisting of named parts or organSj'^and 

 also assemblages of individual plants, some spoken of as grass, some 

 as herbs, some as thorns, others as thistles, some as bushes, others 

 as trees. Though it be no more than a passing glimpse that one has 

 gained, it is enough to excite curiosity, and to suggest a number of 



1 Genesis vol. ii, pp. 19, 20. 



