LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 



99 



known as a "scientific botanist," what he wished to ascertain was 

 the function of this substance in the economy of plant life. This 

 "he certainly did discover; but he never could have done so had he 

 •confined his investigations to the pith as no longer vitalized and 

 ■operative; therefore he must have sought it in its young and 

 growing state, when of all parts of the plant this is most tender, ; 

 replete with sap, and a strong center of vital activity, really the i 

 matrix within which are generated both bark and wood. The 

 new name which he gives it is i.ir}rpa, the word mother, fxyrrip, 

 somewhat altered, and in earlier Greek -the womb, the mother of 

 life.i 



Theophrastus never records his processes of investigation; but 

 -when he selects the word met ra, matrix, to be the appropriate name 

 ■of the pith of plants, we see at once that it does not really apply 

 to it in its white, imponderous, and devitalized condition, and that 

 he must have named it in reference to its earlier state, that of 

 living parenchyma. We may well divest ourselves of the prejudice 

 that the beginnings of a scientific and sound plant anatomy were 

 not made until after the invention of lenses and microscopes. 

 This man of antiquity, he who had progressed so far in plant em- 

 bryology as to have made out even the seed distinctions between 

 €xogens and endogens, could just as easily discover, in the cross- 

 section of a large and very tender shoot of elder or of maple, the 

 first traces of the several fibro-vascular bundles standing in a circle 

 midway between where the pith was to be and the place of the bark. 

 Successive cross-sections made at intervals would reveal to him 

 the gradual hardening and widening of those bundles, their final 

 apparent meeting and coalescing into the cylinder of hard wood 

 intervening between the central pith and the now formative bark. 

 It is undoubted that Theophrastus had thus seen, in young shoots, 

 the early stage at which bark and pith are all one in form and 

 ■substance, and that from it, even within it, both wood and 

 bark are gradually generated; and that because of this he called 

 the juicy soft living pith the metra, the matrix. In reality, while 

 searching to find what pith would be like in its living state, and 

 "what in that state its function ihight seem to be, Theophrastus 

 had discovered living parenchyma. 



Such a conclusion, when we have been driven to it in order that 

 the man's words may not be meaningless, needs no further support; 

 and yet there is one other circumstance which would confirm it 



' Just as in certain European languages still spoken there is no one ■word 

 for womb, but the phrase "mother of life " instead. 



