LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 69 



and reasonings, I say, doubtless established and named such lesser 

 groups as tree, perhaps bush, certainly garden vegetable and field 

 and garden weed, and grass and reed, rush and mushroom; but 

 the synthesis of all as in some way alike and interrelated, and as 

 spoken of comprehensively under one word — that would seem to 

 have awaited the advent of a master mind like that of Aristotle. 

 The written record of so significant a piece of method in nature 

 study I find for the first time in Aristotle's greatest botanical dis- 

 ciple. The fuller investigation of this topic may be deferred until we 

 come to Theophrastus as the founder of Botanical Terminology. 



From another viewpoint Theophrastus beheld the world of 

 plants as divisible into the cultivated and the wild ^ ; and he formally 

 approves this line of separation, though almost as compelled by 

 circumstances; for he admits that it is not natural, and that the 

 differences are in the main such as result from cultivation. It 

 presents, nevertheless, a forcible example of rude primitive plant 

 classifying. Untaught peoples of all countries, and many all 

 around us, hold to such a division, — and that even superstitiously ; 

 firmly believing that the wild parsnip or wild carrot — differing 

 from its parent plant only as growing spontaneously by the way- 

 side, rather than within the garden wall under cultivation — is a 

 poisonous thing, perilous to the life of him who would dare to eat 

 it. Our present nomenclature of plants, the vernacular as well as 

 the Latin, presents countless clear vestiges of the former popularity 

 of this antique parting of all the plant world into these two divisions. 

 Such specific adjectives as agrestis, silvestris, trivialis, arvensis, 

 pratensis, hortensis, sativus, urbanus, and many more tell of a 

 time past when about the first question concerning any plant was, 

 whether it was wild or cultivated. There is no need of citing exam- 

 ples of those hundreds of vernacular plant names the first term of 

 which is " wild " ; but all of them, as relics of pristine botanical ages, 

 attest the once universal prevalence of this partitioning of all things 

 that grow out of the ground, into the two groups of the cultivated 

 and the wild. 



As for Theophrastus, out of the some 500 species and varieties 

 of plants of which he treats, only an insignificant proportion are 

 other than domesticated ; and he says that the uncultivated things 

 of wildwood and mountain are mostly still unknown and have no 

 names. To have assigned space in his book for the consideration 

 of many wild plants must have appeared like a marked innovation; 



1 Hist., Book i, ch. 6. 



