8o SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



the individual leaf of the tamarind tree is of many leaflets, like that 

 of the rose. The philosopher devised now and then a new botanical 

 term, but did this Avith reserve; and the discovery of compound 

 leaves does not appear to have called, in his thought, for any such 

 distinction as that of leaf and leaflet. He applies the term leaf, 

 (pvXXov, to the compound leaf as a whole, and to the individual 

 leaflet indiscriminately. As regards the differences of compound 

 leaves and the classification of them he did nothing; nor, indeed, 

 does anything appear to have been attempted in this direction, 

 after Theophrastus, until the time of Jung, who in the middle 

 of the seventeenth century strongly advanced the morphology 

 of the leaf. But Theophrastus in his environment can not have 

 met with anything like that diversity of compound leaves with 

 which Jung was familiar. He must have known the bipinnate 

 fronds of certain ferns, but did not essay any description of them; 

 and when a certain bipinnate-leaved tree from Egypt {Mimosa polya- 

 cantha, Wifld.) was in need of a description, he evaded the difficulty 

 of the situation by saying that its leaves were like those of a fern.^ 

 We shall be furnished later with some proofs that the venerable 

 Greek could make significant discoveries in connection with such 

 very little things of the plant world as small apetalous flowers, and 

 even the inner structure of small seeds. Without microscope, 

 hand lens, or spectacles, he seems to have been almost microscopic- 

 eyed sometimes, as well as alw^ays alert for the detection of the 

 exceptional or unusual in the grosser morphology of things. We 

 therefore wonder that, after his having noted so carefully that 

 some leaves, even small ones, are compound and even doubly 

 compound, he should not have taken stipules into account; for he 

 makes no mention of them. During it may have been fifty winters 

 he had seen the branchlets of the plane trees under which lay his 

 daily walks, encircled at intervals by their wheel-shaped stipules 

 still persistent after the body of the leaf had fallen. During as 

 many summers of his centenarian career he had observed the 

 foliage of many garden leguminosae, in some species of which every- 

 where in cultivation anciently, more than half the foliar area is 

 stipule; and yet this organ is unmentioned by Theophrastus. As 

 to its presence on the boughs of the most common Athenian way- 

 side shade tree, and its more conspicuous showing amid the herbage 

 of every sort of pea and vetch and lentil, this father of plant 

 organography is as silent as if the organ had not existed. This 



' Hist., Book iv, ch 3. 



