LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 



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the rhizotomos had been an outspoken heretic of this stamp. 

 Theophrastus quotes his bold theory. In his secret soul he believes 

 it sound; yet for the sake of avoiding scandal to the forty and 

 nine or the ninety and nine, he veils his belief by admitting that 

 some wild plants refuse to be tamed ; a fact which may innocently be 

 construed as against Hippon's idea. The other fact which the 

 historian failed to apprehend is that the Greek outlines, and gives 

 names to, a half-dozen or more of large natural groups, every one 

 of them embracing without discrimination plants domesticated and 

 wild. He thus completely nullifies that distinction, yet it is all so 

 quietly, and as regards the superficial reading so covertly, done as 

 to escape the notice of the forty-nine out of fifty of his readers; 

 even also of our latter-day botanical historians, learned men and 

 able, yet with mental vision impaired by the strong light of those 

 typographic pedantries — convenient and helpful, certainly — ^which 

 the botany of the nineteenth century had as a legacy from that of 

 the eighteenth; affected by a sort of botanico-literary dysopsia 

 which is slow to perceive that such a name as ferulaceae is as per- 

 fectly the name 'of a natural family of plants as when printed 

 FERULACE^. ' 



The recognition of genera — ^using the term in a modern sense — 

 is as informal with Theophrastus as that of families. However, 

 when we come to the word itself, yevos, genus, it is employed 

 variously — that is, with several different degrees of comprehensive- 

 ness. Indeed every natural group is with him a " genus," whether 

 it be of the whole assemblage of herbaceous growths, or a family 

 group, or a genus in our sense, or a species, or a variety merely. 

 It seems to be the exact equivalent of our English expression "a 

 kind " ; and because such use of the word ' ' kind ' ' is not yet obsolete, 

 at least surviving in rural districts, it will not be difficult to make 

 plain its meaning. If a gardener or farmer of the present day 

 mention to a botanist that he has in cultivation a strange plant of 

 the squash, cucumber, and gourd kind, the latter understands 

 perfectly that this is something belonging to the family of the 

 Cucurbitaceae, though he can go no further. But if it now be said 

 in rustic phrase that the plant is something in between the squash 

 kind and the gourd kind, he has used the word in a different and 

 much more limited sense ; for now the skilled botanist at once puts 

 out of mind seven out of the eight primary divisions — subfamilies 

 — of the cucurbits, or, in other words, dismisses from his thought, 

 we will say, sixty or more of the seventy genera of this family ; for 

 he clearly understands the farmer to have that in view which must 



