74 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



displace another definition which, though time-honored, was 

 fallacious. That antique fallacious definition of a root has not 

 yet been universally displaced. Without going quite out of sight 

 of some of our colleges one may elicit that same old characterization 

 of the root, and from the voices of people who have a certain 

 familiarity with this particular plant organ. Multitudes in every 

 land under the sun to-day will answer promptly that the root is 

 the underground part of a plant. The Lesbian boy, while yet 

 untaught by either Plato or Aristotle, it is most likely would have 

 given this same answer. In maturer years, after much careful 

 questioning of nature, he has found that that popular definition of 

 a root does not hold good. The shrub or tree which the Greeks 

 call Helix, the common ivy, he has observed minutely and ex- 

 perimented with until he has established it that those threads by 

 which it climbs rocks, walls, and tree-trunks have nothing of the 

 nature of tendrils, but are perfect roots, exercising in some degree 

 even the usual function of roots. ^ He knows quite as intimately 

 the shrub Ixos, the mistletoe, and that its seeds refuse to so 

 much as sprout elsewhere than on the bark of living trees, into 

 which bark it strikes its roots. 2 He had not seen the banyan tree 

 of the Indies; but there were Greeks, educated Greeks, who had 

 both seen and described it, with its many lesser subsidiary trunks 

 grouped around the large central and original one. In their 

 descriptions the travellers had stated so definitely the origin of 

 the accessory trunks as starting out from main branches and 

 growing straight downwards, that Theophrastus without hesitating 

 declared that such things, however trunk-like they may at last 

 appear, are roots. ^ Thus did the first master of organology com- 

 pletely invalidate the ancient world's definition of the root, and 

 at the same time indicate with clearness the two categories of roots, 

 subterranean and aerial. He did not, however, name them. As 

 nomenclator of even his own most brilliant discoveries he was 

 usually delinquent. We seem to read it between his lines that 

 there were in his mind some suggestions of root characteristics 

 which, had he been less cautious than he was, he might have 

 added to that very reserved and merely physiologic'al definition. 

 The downward growth from the branches, in case of the banyan, 

 and also the statement that those pendents at first and while 

 young and tender are of a light color and hairy (!) — both these 



1 Hist., Book iii, ch. 18. 



' De Causis Plantarum, Book ii, ch. 23. 



3 Hist., Book iv, ch. 5. 



