LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY^ — GREENE I 27 



he distinguishes (i) marine aquatics, (2) marine Httoral plants, 

 (3) plants that grow in deep fresh waters, (4) plants of shallow 

 lake shores, (5) those affecting the wet banks of streams and rivers, 

 (6) and those of marshes. His marine herbaceous plants are mostly 

 algae. The submerged trees, resembling in mode of growth and 

 branching oaks, fig-trees, the palm, and the vine, and attributed 

 to the Red Sea, are mostly corals; organisms that were still con- 

 sidered to be plants, denominated lithophytes, until within the last 

 two hundred years. The author, in describing the marine oak, 

 marine fig-tree, etc., is careful to inform his readers that their 

 resemblances to the trees of the land are only those of mode branch- 

 ing; that they are smaller than their terrene analogues and have 

 no leaves. In stagnant fresh waters several cubits deep thrive 

 nelumbo, nymphaea and trapa. Along the shores, in shallow 

 water are reeds, rushes, the papyrus, sparganium, and typha. 

 The banks of running streams suit the poplar, alder, and willow, 

 the roots of which only are laved by the flowing waters. In wet 

 sandy soil not far from streams thrives the cyperus with nut -like 

 edible roots. 



That ecology should have formed a sort of taxonomic basis for 

 Theophrastus in his treating of wild plants was most natural. 

 Such pronouncedly hydrophilous growths as reeds and rushes, 

 coarse sedges and the largest grasses, phragmites and arundo, 

 besides typha and sparganium — all are at agreement not only 

 ecologically but in many respects also morphologically. They 

 all have upright, smooth, and simple stems, filled with pith when 

 young, some of them hollow when mature, but none ever woody- 

 solidified; their foliage long, narrow, entire, never with any trace 

 of the network of veins. Moreover, every one of the group was 

 what would have been called flowerless, by all save Theophrastus and 

 his students; because they had no flower-leaves. Other aquatics, 

 such as nelumbo and the water-lilies, colocasia and sagittaria, were 

 like the rest structurally except as to foliage, the leaves being large 

 and ample, rounded rather than narrow-elongated, with radiating 

 veins if any, and some of them with large flowers made up of showy 

 leaves. The Greek, I say, might have written such a diagnosis of 

 his aquatics as a group viewed morphologically. That he saw these 

 marks none will doubt who reads his descriptions of the species. 



In the vegetation of the mountains he again lists the trees that 

 grow on the exposed and sunward slopes, and those that flourish 

 nowhere but upon cold northward declivities, and such as inhabit 

 only the frigid summits. 



