162 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



lationships in dissected specimens have given him hours of 

 pleasure, all of which may be recalled by the sight and odor 

 of the flower. Beauty is measured by the satisfaction and the 

 permanency of delight which an object gives. 



The scope of the science of botany is indicated by its 

 name. If we were to designate it uniformly with zoology, 

 geology, physiology, and other "ologies," we should have the 

 term phytology, from the Greek word, <j>vr6v, a plant. The 

 name, botany, comes from /Joravr?, the Greek word for grass 

 or pasture. But the Greek noun is derived from the verb 

 ftosKeiv, meaning to feed* or to nourish. Botany, there- 

 fore, is primarily the science of things good to eat. And 

 when we recognize that we are absolutely dependent upon 

 plants, either directly or indirectly for daily food, we can 

 understand how the desire to know plants the edible from 

 the poisonous, the more palatable and nutritious from those 

 that are less so was a very early development among the 

 genus Homo. Moreover, the sampling of various plants soon 

 led to the knowledge that some of them produce marked ef- 

 fects besides nourishing and poisoning, and a knowledge of 

 the medicinal properties of plants became an incentive to 

 their study. 



As might readily be inferred from these considerations, 

 the work of the earliest botanists consisted almost entirely in 

 merely describing and cataloging plants. The object of this 

 was to identify the plants mentioned by Theophrastus, Galen, 

 and other physicians of antiquity, for it was not yet known 

 that the native plants of Greece did not grow wild in Ger- 

 many. These catalogs were contained in cumbersome "her- 

 bals," and the plants were often merely arranged alphabeti- 

 cally to facilitate reference. 



But this botanical book-keeping in time gave rise to com- 

 parative studies and attempts to classify the plants described. 

 Herbaria, or collections of dried plants, began to be made 



*i. e., to drive to pasture. 



