64 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



transient; a very remarkable division of the series, as true to 

 nature as any classification of organs that ever has been proposed 

 anywhere by any man. and yet, as I suppose, entirely peculiar to 

 Theophrastus' method. How thoroughly natural and scientific 

 this proposition is, may be further shown; as also how studiously 

 the learned Greek nature student reached his conclusion about it. 

 It is not the deciduous tree only whose different organs fall into 

 the two classes of the permanent and the transient. He has dis- 

 covered that the evergreen trees, like the rest, acquire one set of 

 new leaves each year, and as unvaryingly lose an old set ' ; so that 

 their perpetual verdure is due to this only, that each set of leaves 

 remains on the tree during two or more seasons. It is clear to his 

 mind that if leaves, flowers, and fruits are to be catalogued as plant 

 organs at all, the division of the whole series into constant organs 

 and inconstant must be maintained. But he is even perplexed 

 with a question of whether those inconstant and scarcely more 

 than occasional parts are to be listed as plant organs at all 2; a 

 position which most twentieth-century readers will think very 

 singular and strange. But must there not also have been with 

 him a time of doubt as to the placement of certain other very com- 

 mon and external parts of plants? Such things as prickles, spines, 

 thorns, tendrils, excrescences of several kinds which imitate fruits 

 but are not — it was by no accidental oversight that these were 

 omitted from his catalogue of plant organs. Since in the phyto- 

 graphic and taxonomic parts of his writing he evinces his perfect 

 familiarity with them, it becomes certain that he surveyed with 

 his wonted carefulness the ground of their possible right to enumera- 

 tion among these other organs, and that he deliberately ruled them 

 out. The ground of his doubt concerning leaf, flower, and fruit 

 as admissible into the line he states fully. Being himself first a 

 zoologist, then a botanist, and always interested in making com- 

 parisons between these two kingdoms of nature, he is aware that 

 the foetus of a gravid animal is no part or organ of that animal. 

 The fruit of plants, being analogous to the animal foetus, should 

 be denied any place in the list of plant organs. To make this 

 part of the Theophrastan argument quite clear to the reader, it 

 will be needful to anticipate our study of his anthology in so far 

 as to say that the conception of ovary and ovules as being parts of 

 the flower is one that never entered into the mind of Theophrastus. 

 With him those first small rudiments, as they appear still encircled by 



' Hist., Book i, ch. 15. 

 2 Hisi., Book i, ch. i. 



