50 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOyS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



phrastus credits him with having maintained that there is the closest 

 analogy between the organs of plants and those of animals. Infor- 

 mation like this can not fail to awaken regret that the writings of 

 Cleidemus have not survived ; it would now be so very interesting 

 to know whether this genius o^ a forgotten time went so far beyond 

 those of later periods as to have apprehended the existence of 

 breathing organs and those of sex in plants. 



HipPON was among the rhizotomi who philosophized about 

 plants in general, and wrote books. His writings are quoted by 

 both Aristotle^ and Theophrastus,^ and he appears to have been 

 the earliest among students of plant life and form to venture the 

 opinion that all cultivated trees, shrubs, and herbs have been derived 

 from wild ones, and are susceptible of reversion to their pristine 

 condition. It is the earliest hint— and a very early one, apparently 

 unknown to the annalists of evolution — of what cultivation may 

 accomplish in the way of transformation. But the doctrine must 

 have had the sound of a heresy verging toward atheism in the ears 

 of a populace that had never questioned the proposition that every 

 cultivated plant and tree had been coeval with the human race, 

 and had been so created at the first. 



But it is not that small, better-educated, more reflective, and 

 philosophizing contingent of the rhizotomi, or the possible influence 

 of these few upon early botanical theory, that we are just now 

 chiefly concerned with. It is rather that in this whole body of 

 those who, for so many pre-Theophrastan centuries, followed the 

 root-gatherers' calling, we have the men who securely established 

 that precedent, from which the earliest philosophic students of and 

 writers about plants did not break away, of taking full cognizance 

 of those among plant organs which nature had most deeply con- 

 cealed, as if they were perhaps the last and the least to be considered. 

 It was the example of the rhizotomists, in their books of plant 

 description extant in the times of Aristotle and Theophrastus, that 

 impelled Theophrastus and others after him to give the form, 

 texture, color, odor, flavor, as well as the active properties, when 

 these were known, of the roots or underground parts of almost 

 every plant. And when, as already noted, it is seen that from 

 Dioscorides and Pliny down through the middle ages, and out to 

 near the end of the seventeenth century, authors in general de- 

 scribed and figured the roots of every weed and grass and bush and 

 tree, it will be conceded to have been the lot of the half-illiterate 



' Aristotle, De Anim., Book i, ch. 2. 



» Theophrastus, Hist Plant., Book i, ch. 6. 



