CHAPTER I 



THE RHIZOTOMI 



It is characteristic of all very early phytography that the root, 

 that least obvious and most hardly accessible of plant organs, is 

 as carefully described as are the stems, the leaves, and the fruits. 

 This fact that the first of all describers of plants should have taken 

 the root into account, and that so uniformly and so particularly, 

 must seem strange enough to every thoughtful botanist of later 

 centuries; it is in such marked contrast to the descriptive usages 

 with which we of the present are better acquainted. 



In the voluminous and carefully technical phytographic works 

 of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth, one may chance upon 

 successive pages filled with descriptions of scores of species, about 

 the roots of which not a word is said. Nothing like this occurs in 

 any book or chapter of Theophrastus,Dioscorides,or any other classic 

 botanical writer. In the case of every species of herbaceous plant, 

 and of many that are woody, they do not conclude a description 

 without telling us what the subterranean parts are like, whether 

 fibrous or fleshy or tuberous or bulbous, usually informing us as to 

 the colors of these organs, as well as the properties of them when 

 they are known to have any. And so carefully did the fathers 

 who wrought a revival of botany in the sixteenth century follow 

 those classic models that, in their illustrated folios, never a plant 

 is figured the root of which is not as faithfu ly delineated as the 

 foliage or the flower. Even in the letterpress accompanying the 

 plates of Brunfels, Fuchs, Tragus, and others, the root is as well 

 described as the foliage, and much better than the flower. All 

 this for the simple reason that the great masters of remote antiquity 

 had set them the example. But how did it come to pass that the 

 ancient Greek botanists were so almost singularly familiar with 

 the underground parts of plants, and that they so accentuated the 

 importance of them to phytography? One would not have ex- 

 pected this, and it seems almost anomalous. No one who ever 

 went forth to make philosophic conquest of the vegetable kingdom 



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