LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 21 



authors of botanical commentary on the Bible, on Homer, on 

 Vergil, and the classics generally, have completely overlooked. 

 Let me repeat it, that in several pieces of very old literature there 

 are legible traces of a science of botany; traces of which even 

 learned and botanically instructed commentators seem to have 

 failed to take due note. 



Here, let any reader who has supposed that certain sciences had 

 their beginnings in the minds of men who wrote books, banish, if 

 possible, that idea. No opinion ever held by a multitude of people 

 was more groundless. If, according to the definitions given by 

 authorities, science is classified knowledge and classification is the 

 process of distinguishing and separating between things like and 

 unlike, then there are certain of our sciences the earliest rudiments of 

 which are almost among the very necessities of human speech. It 

 will not be easy to imagine a tribe of wandering savages on any 

 continent or in any age unused to the distinctions of plain, hill, 

 mountain, or spring, brook, river, lake, and ocean. Their very 

 languages will show that their mind had wrought out these per- 

 fectly solid and immovable foundations of the science of Geography. 

 Long subsequently the man of enlightenment, he who knows how to 

 commit thought to writing, takes this old and hitherto unwritten 

 classification of the diversities of the earth's surface, gives it logical 

 statement, dignifies it with the Greek name Geography, and then 

 proceeds to build as on very old yet firm foundations his nobler 

 edifice. He may or may not recognize it that those indispensable 

 group names, plain and mountain, lake and river, are but a heritage 

 to his scientific geography from a very far off antiquity; from an 

 antiquity the history of which neither has been written, nor ever 

 will be. It were well, however, that the geographer should perceive 

 it that the real first beginnings of his science are not with the author 

 of any book, but that they antedate all writing. 



Botany, as certainly as geography, had its initiative in primal man's 

 distinguishings and separatings between objects appertaining to the 

 world of plants. The fact that in the rudest and simplest dialects 

 of primitive peoples there exist group names for botanical entities 

 establishes this. It .is improbable that there ever was a primitive 

 language, other than that of some arctic tribe, in which there did not 

 occur words equivalent to tree, bush, grass, or to trunk, branch, 

 leaf, fruit, root; and every one of these is the name, not of an indi- 

 vidual object, but of a group of like objects. Each is a general — a 

 generic — name, and each testifies most clearly to observation, 

 comparison, reflection, generalization, and also either the invention 



