LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE I05 



diagnosis. The number of the indicative types was gradually 

 augmented, and the use of them was universal even with the 

 fathers of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century botany; nor has any 

 later generation wholly ceased from the usage ; though it is perhaps 

 chiefly conspicuous nowhere but in nomenclature, where such 

 specific appellations as salicifolia, alnifolia, betulijolia, delphini- 

 folia, and a hundred more, though ostensibly figuring but as names, 

 may chance to be the best part of the diagnosis, at least in the 

 estimation of any not well versed in the post-Linnsean descriptive 

 terminology. 



It is not to be inferred from anything here said, that the Greek 

 knew nothing of any geometric terminology of leaf forms. In that 

 chapter in which he treats of leaf forms in general he names the 

 orbicular, the oblong, the angular, and some others ^ ; but they 

 lack definiteness of meaning, at least such definiteness as the 

 exigencies of plant diagnosis call for; though terms that bear upon 

 differences of apex, margin, and base as well as the superficies of 

 the leaf are of more fixed and certain meaning. 



It will be observed that even flowers are described by Theo- 

 phrastus comparatively, the less known being brought into con- 

 trast with the well known; and the same rule applies, of course, 

 in his diagnoses of fruits and seeds. He was not particularly 

 given to describing plants. A great proportion of those which he 

 discourses upon w^ere well known to all who would become his 

 readers. The common things of the gardens, of the cultivated 

 fields, of orchard and vineyard and of academic grove, were so 

 familiar that the mention of the name was sufficient. But when 

 he undertakes the description of any herb or bush or tree, he is apt 

 to give more than a rude outline of it; very often a good w^ord 

 picture of it; and he who does this is a master of phytography, 

 without question about the age in which he has lived, or the method 

 he has employed. In the case of a number of Asiatic and African 

 trees unknown to Theophrastus except by report of travellers, he 

 so carefully gleans all that others have said about them, and with 

 such consummate art sums up the whole, and draws up his own 

 description, that in reading it one finds it not easy to realize that 

 the author of it never saw the tree. The books of botany that 

 were composed by Greeks and by Latins within three or four 

 centuries after Theophrastus show that the authors of them copied 

 his descriptions whenever such were available, and in other cases 

 made his the model of their own diagnoses. When we come to the 



» Hist., Book i, ch. 16. 



