LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 59 



He was free to dispose of them, to publish any parts of them, ac- 

 cording to his own judgment. Modern science and erudition have 

 no example to show us of like community of even intellectual 

 property between two illustrious friends. Moreover, from the fact 

 of Theophrastus' having lived and studied and written during half a 

 century after Aristotle's demise, we are warranted in thinking of 

 him as of one who had acquired a great store of knowledge about 

 plants beyond all that to which Aristotle in his briefer day had 

 attained. 



As having been the author of the oldest distinctively botanical 

 treatise that is extant, the place of Theophrastus is unique, and 

 invites to special and careful consideration. He writes from the 

 midst of an advanced civilization ; a state of society in which there 

 is much farming, extensive cultivation of the vine and olive, fruit 

 growing, market gardening, and cultivating of medicinal, aro- 

 matic, and ornamentally flowering herbs, shrubs, and trees; a time 

 when many improved varieties of all sorts of things have been 

 derived through cultivation, and when it is already perfectly well 

 known that such improved varieties can not be depended on to 

 come true to seed, but may be preserved, and the stock of each 

 increased by division of roots, by cuttings, and by grafting. It is 

 also a time when the very masterpieces of literature — some of 

 them even in Theophrastus' time ancient and classic — abound in 

 facts and fancies and myths and fables about flowers and fruits, 

 shrubs and trees. Of course all obvious and familiar parts of 

 plants — their organs — have their names. These are a part of the 

 common vocabulary of things. Also group names for growths that 

 are alike are in as universal requisition. If a genus evidently con- 

 sists of several different kinds, be they what the botanist of the 

 present would denominate species, or be they notable varieties 

 only, each such kind is designated in speech or writing by a cog- 

 nomen; so that a binary nomenclature, precisely that which all 

 farmers, gardeners, and foresters find needful and have always 

 created and employed, is perfectly established. 



Such, in brief outline, is what Greek civilization had attained to 

 in the way of experimental knowledge of plants, independently of 

 all philosophy, and without help from the philosophers. And 

 if Theophrastus had been less than a botanical philosopher, and if 

 as a mere annalist he had but recorded the untaught industrial 

 and experimental botany of his period, together with that very 

 considerable vocabulary of botanical terms which then formed a 

 part of the Greek language, he would still have done us an ines- 



