LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 63 



such terms had been the legacy to human speech made by a primeval 

 race of nature-ponderers, almost infinitely remote and prehistoric 

 even in Theophrastus' time. 



Observe now, that while root, stem, bud, leaves, flowers, etc., 

 are familiar and obvious parts of a tree, they are far enough from 

 being a complete list of such obvious parts. Viewed at close range 

 the bark is very conspicuous; more so than either the buds or 

 flowers in the majority of arboreal and arborescent growths; and 

 since he has here left it out, one is obliged to think that this point 

 was well inqmred into by him; that the omission was deliberate, 

 and the result of sound reasoning. We shall find proof ~ by and by 

 that he investigated the inner structure of trees ; and there, among 

 the anatomical parts of the tree as they disclose themselves in the 

 cross-section of its trunk or stem, we shall find him cataloguing 

 the bark. To separate organography into the two divisions, 

 morphological and anatomical, is, then, also classic. It is another 

 part of universally approved botanical method which originated 

 with and was established by Theophrastus. 



With that Theophrastan list of organs under consideration, 

 modern botany at the very outset divides it into two parts, la- 

 beling one division' of them the vegetative organs, the other 

 tfie~reproductive.^ The Greek has incidentally given us to know 

 that her too r pondered very seriously indeed the question of a 

 natural division of his series, and that he effected one. It is as far 

 as possible from corresponding to our modem classification of the 

 same organs, and must needs have been so; because the only repro- 

 ductive organs of plants known to Theophrastus were seeds and '' 

 buds. Of the sexual organism of the flower he had no information. 

 He was without a microscope. His dividing line between the two / , 

 classes of organs is drawn, not as with us toward the upper end of 

 the series, but near the middle of it. Root, stem, branch, bud, 

 form the first division; and the perfect naturalness of it may be 

 realized by observing that precisely those organs, and no more, 

 are what one enumerates as constituting deciduous woody plants 

 in their winter condition. No leaf, no flower, no fruit is there; 

 yet the organism as it stands betrays no imperfection. From 

 its deepest rootlets to its remotest twigs and scaly buds it 

 is alive, in health, perfectly normal in every particular. What is 

 more, every such tree and shrub on the face of the earth passes 

 half the period of its life in just that condition, no difference 

 whether that life period be fifteen years or fifteen hundred. It is 

 a classifying of the external organs of a plant as permanent and 



