I [O SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



segregates herb, vegetable, weed, grass, plant. And the endeavors 

 of our English scientific forefathers to make any one of those 

 terms serve as the name for herbaceous growths in general have 

 been unsuccessful. Theophrastus had been in the same pre- 

 dicament as that which became theirs. In his mother tongue 

 there was cpmov, the herbaceous plant of cultivation, at least 

 as to its most primitive signification; there were ^(x^f^'^'ov, the 

 kitchen- garden vegetable, ^oTamj, the weed, and noa, the grass, 

 the forage herb. The first of these terms qjinov, the herbaceous 

 thing that men plant and transplant and cultivate, was a term 

 that he himself appears to have rendered unavailable. He had 

 made it to include the whole vegetable kingdom from oak and 

 pine to seaweed and fungus. The name that to him seemed most 

 reasonably available for designating the sum of all things green — 

 herbaceous — was the common name of the grasses and fodder plants, 

 noa. When I say reasonably available, my thought is that the 

 selecting of the term grass rather than the term herb for expressing 

 the aggregate was most natural to any one who, like Theophrastus, 

 had thought the matter over. The grasses form by far the greater 

 proportion of that low-growing verdure which, outside of the 

 forests and thickets, covers the whole earth in all temperate lati- 

 tudes during half the year. It was therefore more true to nature 

 — more scientific — to take up that term which came so near being 

 synonymous with verdure. The term herb is comparatively unfit, as 

 suggesting a much smaller aggregate, and that also of plants marked 

 by odors, flavors, and other qualities which the eye can not detect. 

 There are even modern languages in which the word for all green 

 herbage is the correlative of our word "grass": languages in the 

 botanical vernacular of which, what we call herbaceous plants are 

 known only as " grass." This was strictly true of our English 

 of only a few centuries ago.^ Thus again how plain it is that the 

 forefather of all botany produced this primal outline taxonomic 

 only after the most careful weighing and considering of every 

 point involved. Nor must our attention be called away from this 

 first chapter of Theophrastus' classification without our having 

 observed the sequence of the groups. Why does he begin with the 

 Grand Division of the trees and proceed downward to that which 



' There is a familiar sacred verse that attests this: "All flesh is grass, and 

 all the glory of man is as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the 

 flower thereof falleth away." — I Pet. i, 24. At the date of this translation 

 gramineous plants were regarded as flowerless. Therefore in the minds of 

 the learned translators even showily flowering herbaceous plants were a 

 part of "grass. " 



