62 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



botanical ancestry, but that all so-called modern botany has this 

 fundamental of plant-morphology from old Theophrastus. and all 

 unawares. But the surprise passes. The sentence is so simple, 

 so natural, so logical, the connection between term and term so 

 perfect, that one doubts that it could have been done otherwise; 

 and may be disposed to say to himself that any botanist of whatever 

 epoch might have gone out on a morning walk, looked at a number 

 of different kinds of growths, come in and written down that method- 

 ical proposition offhand. It is extremely improbable that it was so 

 done. It is next to certain that it cost its author a great deal of 

 careful observation and prolonged study and reflection. The 

 sentence is studiedly methodical, and no less a dictum of science 

 than a work of art. It is easy to forget that, as in art, the produc- 

 tion from which all evidence of the artist's anxious care and hard 

 work has been eliminated is the masterpiece, so in science and 

 philosophy the axiom or the aphorism which when finished reads 

 as easily, smoothly, and convincingly as if every one always must 

 have seen its transparent truthfulness, and as if almost any novice 

 in that same science might have written it down in just those 

 words — that this is the little sentence which may have cost its 

 author the expenditure of time and mental energy with which he 

 might have written a whole volume upon some topic that was not 

 difficult. 



If the origin of the simplest elements of universal botany is to 

 be shown, this Theophrastan list of plant organs will have to be 

 looked into rather particularly; will need to be studied with great 

 care and caution. Those six or seven important terms, as our 

 philosopher links them together, constitute the most classic piece 

 of elementary botany in existence. The sentence has also much 

 to reveal about the author's botanical method in general. 



First of all, the terms of the sentence, root, stem, leaf, bud, etc., 

 have not been created or invented by Theophrastus. As the 

 names of those things they are part of the common vocabulary; 

 botanical terms, assuredly, yet in their framing and use doubtless 

 far antedating all written botany. That our first philosopher of 

 plant life, he who first brought the terms together and placed them 

 in line, altered the meaning of certain of them by giving them a 

 more comprehensive or else a more restricted application, is easily 

 possible; though that does not here concern us. We have but to 

 note that this fine equipment of most fundamental botanic terms, 

 the first botanist — as we must denominate him despite the sug- 

 gestion of the paradoxical— found ready made. They and other 



