LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 6/ 



only less extensively resorted to by the ancient Greeks than it is by 

 ourselves; and they knew as well as we that when a cutting set 

 into the ground has remained for weeks and maybe months with- 

 out having been increased by so much as one leaf, that only means 

 that it is slow in forming its roots, and that until these are 

 somewhat grown, other growth will not begin. It is improbable 

 that this kind of fact was not of common knowledge with gardeners 

 and orchardmen ages before Theophrastus ; so that all he had to 

 do was to verify it by experiment. But when he states that even 

 within the seed it is the radicle which fitst begins to swell and grow, 

 and that this is invariably the first part of the growing seed to appear 

 outside the shell, i we feel assured that these are fruits of observa- 

 tion on the part of no gardener, but of a biologist. 



In the year 1672 of our era Nehemiah Grew, aided by a microscope 

 {!), had repeated those investigations of the seed as germinating, 

 and published what was but a confirmation of the view that Theo- 

 phrastus had presented some nineteen hundred years before, 

 namely, that biologically considered the root is first among plant 

 organs, then the stem, and after them, leaf, flower, and fruit. 



One must now leave the Theophrastan method in merely ele- 

 mentary organography, and survey briefly the outlines of his 

 ■dealing with plant as compared with plant. 



The philosopher has several different viewpoints from each of 

 which he perceives the vegetable kingdom as a whole to be divisible 

 into two parts. The first of these divisions is according to texture 

 and duration of stem and root ; a chapter in botany which he wrote 

 for all time; the distinction between woody plants and herbaceous. , 

 Trees and shrubs, alike as to their woodiness, are distinguished by 

 him precisely as in the most recent botany, not neglecting the 

 ■word of caution that no hard and fast line separates the two; 

 that many,, like the filbert and the pomegranate, are naturally 

 ■shrubs, the stems growing in clumps, and are seen in the form and 

 •dimensions of trees only when under the cultivator's care and art. 

 Even the pear tree, olive, and fig when left to themselves become 

 many-stemmed and shrub-like. He also apprizes the reader that 

 -certain pot-herbs of the gardens have always the one-stemmed and 

 arboreal mode of growth, even approaching trees in their dimen- 

 sions, and all within the time of a few months; but that these have 

 not the duration of trees or even of shrubs, and therefore prove 

 that they are neither. He mentions certain mallow and cabbage 



« Hist., Book viii, ch. ■^. 



