24 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



queries legitimately botanical as to just what, in so primitive a time, 

 may have been the full meaning and acceptation of this or that 

 morphologic or taxonomic term as thus early in general use. Such 

 questionings may not necessarily be idle or useless. There being 

 no room for doubt that as far back as the time of Homer, and even 

 of Moses, there was at least here and there a person somewhat 

 specially skilled in the knowledge of plants, how would such a one 

 have applied, for example, the term root? How many things, in 

 his mind, would have been included under that name? What, in a 

 word, might have been his definition of a root? Possibly we shall 

 never know. Neither is it wholly impossible that we may some 

 day ascertain it, at least approximately; for not so very many cen- 

 turies after Homer specialists in plant knowledge began to write 

 books upon the subject. Some of those books are still extant, and 

 in print ; though they have been made too little use of thus far by our 

 historians, some of whom appear to have been disposed to divide 

 the honors of elementary plant organography between Adam and 

 Linnaeus; which was an easy way of evading an important though 

 most difficult part of botanical history. In the writings, I say, of the 

 earliest of professedly botanical authors there would be reasonable 

 expectation of finding a clue to that primitive conception of the 

 root which was theirs who introduced the word into speech; for 

 always the first work of him who is ready to reform and rebuild a 

 science is that of showing wherein the prevailing opinions are at 

 fault. To him nothing is more necessary than this. Our appeal 

 in this instance must be made to Theophrastus of Eresus, whose 

 writings on the philosophy of plant life and form are the oldest 

 that are extant. As a controversialist this philosopher is of the 

 mildest type; more apt to suggest, urbanely, that an old opinion 

 may be wrong than bluntly to pronounce it false. His whole 

 treatment of the subject of the roots of plants reads as if 

 he had gone to work stealthily to undermine an old and every- 

 where received opinion that roots are simply the underground 

 parts of plants. He names two or three familiar species 

 which, as he reminds his readers, produce roots that are aerial, 

 or at least not subterranean. Then he cites, and very well 

 describes, certain subterranean parts — bulbs and corms, we call 

 them now — which he thinks hardly ought to be considered roots. 

 That Theophrastus openly discredits the doctrine that a root is a 

 root because of its being subterraneously located is proof enough 

 that it was the doctrine commonly received in his time. We are 

 also perfectly warranted in believing that the exceptions he takes 



