LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 83 



tree, and this, as all the world understood, produced its fruits 

 two crops a year, without a trace of flower. And Theophrastus, 

 after all his searching for and philosophizing about flowers, seems 

 to have found no way of controverting the universal opinion. He 

 thought that the fig produces its fruit without flower of any de- 

 scription.^ But in his philosophic quest for flowers of some sort 

 as the forerunners of all fruits and seeds, he appears to have dis- 

 covered true flowers, though sometimes recondite, in other trees 

 that had been supposed to be like the fig, flowerless. The flower, 

 in prehistoric thought and speech, may most reasonably be as- 

 sumed to have been a thing showy on account of its being made 

 up of leaves colored differently from ordinary foliage, and differently 

 arranged. It must have been essentially that which modern 

 botany knows as a corolla. This inference as to what a flower 

 was before either botany or history began to be written is confirmed 

 by our experience with untaught rustics and mountaineers of 

 to-day, as to their understanding of what trees and plants have 

 flowers and what have none. They are the modern counterpart 

 of those unlettered ruralists of remote antiquity whom Theophrastus 

 cites as denying that oak and walnut trees, hazel bushes and chest- 

 nut trees and junipers have any flowers at all.^ The philosopher, 

 the man of science who is truly such, has this among other char- 

 acteristics, that with him negations are apt to go for naught. Of 

 the populace they are largely the mental stock in trade, so to speak, 

 but himself negations do not satisfy. They say that neither oaks 

 nor hazel bushes have flowers. They recognize it that oaks put 

 forth clusters of loose pendulous tassels that they call oak-moss, 

 and also globose bodies denominated galls; but oak-moss is not a 

 flower, any more than oak-galls are acorns. These are specimens 

 of the facts, and of the reasonings upon them, which confronted the 

 protobotanist of so long ago. Stimulated by the thought that 

 almost always where a fruit or seed now is, there was once a flower, 

 from the very heart of which the fruit or seed took its origin, he 

 enters upon his researches. Now this very idea that flower and 

 fruit are related as antecedent and consequent so that where any 

 manner of fruit or seed is found the essentials of a flower must be 

 sought, is the germinal idea out of which the whole of systematic 



' Hist. Book :ii, ch. 6. There is but one record of the discovery of the 

 flower of the fig until after the invention of magnifying lenses, and some 

 eighteen centuries after Theophrastus. Even Linnasus, still later by two 

 centuries, had the genus Ficus under the Cryptogamia. 



2 Hist., Book iii, ch. 6. 



