114 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL.54 



passage reveals gardeners and botanists of remote antiquity in 

 debate about the affinities of genera; and the man whose word of 

 authority might or might not have ended the debate, diplomat that 

 he is, as well as philosopher, expresses no opinion; though none who 

 have studied him well can doubt that he had one, and the correct one. 

 This outlining of families of plants and giving them family 

 names entails one extremely important logical sequence, which 

 one must not fail to indicate. His Arundinaceae, Bulbaceae, Ferula- 

 ceae, Acanaceae, Cichoriaceae, and all the rest, as established on 

 certain organologic characters, are each and all logically and com- 

 pletely subversive of that distinction which he formally keeps up, 

 between things cultivated and things wild; for each such family 

 necessarily includes both. The few historians who have not shrunk 

 away from the time-consuming task of studying the Theophrastan 

 volumes, have been perplexed by his seeming approval of ancient 

 Hippon's theory about the origin of cultivated plants, which 

 seeming approval is at once followed by a feeble argument or two 

 against the theory. Here is what Meyer says, referring to the 

 primary divisions, of tree, shrub, half-shrub, and herb: "Each of 

 these four is subdivided into the groups of the Cultivated and the 

 Wild. Hippon's pronouncement, that every plant is at first wild, 

 and then by cultivation made tame, is thus in a general way ap- 

 proved, though Theophrastus immediately adds that certain 

 wild plants are not at all amenable to cultivation, while others 

 take to it readily, whence it will follow that such a distinction is 

 not altogether untrue to nature."^ This historian's diificulty 

 arises through his having missed two items important to the 

 understanding of the man Theophrastus. First, that the illus- 

 trious Greek was as successfully a student of human nature ^ as he 

 was an investigator of the plant world; and that he studied to 

 avoid opposing with needless directness the prejudices of the 

 multitude. If he should pay no respect to those time-honored 

 categories of the tame and the wild, but should jumble them 

 all together, and openly, forty-nine out of fifty among his readers 

 would adjudge him not only a bold innovator, but perhaps also 

 a godless heretic; for, as elsewhere intimated, the staple plants 

 of agriculture, even in ancient paganism, were viewed as special 

 creations of the gods — their immediate gifts to men. Old Hippon 



' Meyer, Geschichte der Botanik, vol. i, p. 162. 



2 See his Characters of Men, a work completed, as he tells us, in his ninety- 

 ninth year. 



