40-2 I Assembly 



of woody fibre, some of which lived to an age beyond an hund- 

 red years, shrubs and trees. Second, plants of a loose texture^ 

 living hardly two years, many but a few days, or less than one 

 year. This class he subdivided into potherbs, corn and grain 

 plant, succulent plants, or rather oleaginous plants. 



His second book is on the causes of vegetaii&n. We have but 

 the first six out of the eight books of which it was composed 

 originally, and not fourteen, as the scholiast of Nicander says. 

 That treatise is the only one on vegetable physiology which anti- 

 quity has left us. It is as a monument, a most beautiful homage 

 paid to nature. In it he embraces together air, earth and sea. 

 Theophrastus established the doctrine of the relation between 

 vegetable and animal life, on its true basis. The reproduction 

 of vegetable as well as animals (says he) depends upon the inti- 

 mate union of the sexes, which is eifected by corpuscles as fine 

 as dust, found in the male plant : this fecundates the flowers of 

 the female, and causes them to bear fruit. That there is a strik- 

 ing analogy between the odor exhaled by the dust of flowers and 

 that of the seminal fluid of animals. Female plants never bear 

 fruit without the concurrence of the males. The seed of a plant 

 is its egg, in which all the elements of the future plant are con- 

 tained, and which require moisture and heat for their plant to 

 grow. It is by the root that the plant takes from the earth a -part 

 of its nouishment, in that as in the stomach of an animal, the 

 materials held in solution by water there ac(]uire the degree of 

 cooking necessary to enable them to be incorporated in the sub- 

 stance of the plant. It is by the root that the germ breathes in 

 a new life, the body and branches grov/, and the leaves and the 

 fruit appear. The forms^of roots vary infinitely, as well as their 

 peculiar properties. A plant deprived of its root soon perishes. 

 Theophrastus constantly attended to the roots of plants^ and it is 

 regretted that the moderns do not follow his example. 



The plant begins to grow hy showing seminal leaves, whose 

 form are necessarily roundish and simple. Some plants rise with 

 only one such leaf; others have two. The next crop of leaves are 

 of a different shape ; they are variously acute or composite ; 

 their tints various, often of a deep green above and a whitish 

 green below. Each of their faces is formed of fibres and vessels 



