140 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



and their often grotesque metamorphoses, it is greatly to the credit 

 of Theophrastus that he should have risked something of his own 

 popularit)^ as a teacher and author by expressing, even covertly, 

 some of his own doubts and disbeliefs; even as to some, the truth 

 of which seemed so probable that the belief in them is not yet in 

 our time obsolete. 



Recapitulation. Certain opinions that are completely groundless 

 respecting Theophrastus' merits as a botanist, opinions quite 

 opposite to any that had ever before been expressed, and such as 

 no man who had read three chapters of that author could have 

 entertained, have been widely disseminated during the last thirty 

 years. One such statement of opinion is before me and reads 

 thus: " Greek authors built their views of the philosophy of botany 

 on very weak foundations; scarcely a plant was known to them 

 exactly in all its parts; they derived much of their knowledge 

 from the accounts of others, often from dealers in herbs. From 

 this scanty material, and from various popular superstitions had 

 Aristotle formed his views on the nature of plants; and if Theo- 

 phrastus possessed more experimental knowledge, he still saw facts 

 in the light of his master's philosophical doctrines. "^ Such 

 reckless writing as that, betraying innocency not only of Theo- 

 phrastus' work, but also of that high opinion of it which had 

 been expressed by most accomplished botanists of the eighteenth 

 century and the nineteenth, has been widely read by botanists of 

 the present generation. In view of this, it seems more than de- 

 sirable that there be presented briefly and synoptically something 

 like an enumeration of those items, or elements, of universal 

 botany of which Theophrastus appears to have been the discoverer 

 and first promulgator. 



In this recapitulation I shall employ a few modern terms, such 

 as petal, corolla, and androecium, unknown to ancient Greek 

 botany, that I may thereby both more clearly and more briefly 

 express the fact of the Greek's having recognized, though under 

 other names, the things themselves. 



1. He distinguished the external organs of plants, naming and 

 discussing them in regular sequence from root to fruit ; the natural- 

 ness of which sequence was afterwards pointedly denied; but in 

 modern botany it stands everywhere approved. • 



2. He classified such organs as (a) permanent, and (b) transient; 

 a division of them which may yet be shown more scientific than the 

 modern distinguishing of them as (a) vegetative, and (6) reproductive. 

 [^ ' Julius Von Sachs, History of Botany, English edition, p. i6. 



