LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 71 



ently shaped, differently colored, and singularly congested foliar 

 parts that they call the flower. It must have been observed 

 immemorially, and accepted as a nature-taught fact, that such 

 and such trees, weeds, and other plants never display flowers. 

 They are flowerless. What I have been careful to state, namely.if 

 that the primitive notion of a flower is that it consists of leaves,! 

 must be insisted on. The reader must not permit himself to think] 

 of the pristine idea of flowerless plants as embracing anything less 

 than the cryptogams plus the whole body of the apetalous phan-| 

 erogams. With this fixed in our minds, we are then ready to in- 

 quire whether or not Theophrastus made any improvements of his 

 own upon this part of pristine botanic method ; whether perchance 

 he looked into the matter far enough to have discovered that there 

 exist such things as flowers destitute of flower leaves, and thereupon 

 enlarged the boundaries of the flowering plants and correspondingly 

 restricted those of the flowerless group. The answer must await 

 our study of Theophrastan anthology. 



In close connection with his separating between the flowering and 

 the flowerless, the Greek divides the whole plant world again into 

 the two categories of the ' ' fruit-bearing ' ' and the ' ' sterile " . ' Judged 

 by certain criteria that are of comparatively recent adoption there 

 would be no call for this last distinction ; for the flowering and the 

 fructiferous would exactly correspond to each other, as would also 

 the flowerless and the sterile; so that this last seeming distinction 

 would be but a different naming of two primary groups before 

 indicated. But this is not true; for when we have learned his doc- 

 trine of the flower we shall perceive that he had in mind fructiferous 

 plants, and trees even, the flowers of which he had been unable 

 to detect and which therefore of logical necessity he must classify 

 as flowerless. Also, since he knew nothing of such sexual dis- 

 tinctions as have their ground in floral structure, there presented 

 themselves to him what we of to-day know as the males of certain 

 dioecious plants, which flowered freely, and yet were sterile in- 

 variably. There was, then, no correspondence at all between 

 those two items of his method as he saw and indicated them. 



As regards the scientific merits of these two groupings our esti- 

 mate must be formed according to their correspondence with the 

 facts known at the time the groups were proposed, and not by 

 bringing, for example, Theophrastus' groups of "flowering" and 

 " flowerless " abruptly into contrast with those groups as they stand 



' I have inverted Theophrastus' order here. He places fruit-bearing and 

 sterile before flowering and flowerless. 



