LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE I35 



Athens said to have been planted by Hercules, and the Caphian 

 and the Delphic planes, both believed to have been planted by 

 Agamemnon — he is somewhat incredulous. The traditions as to 

 their origin have come down by some who also wrote fables. It 

 might be well to investigate. He thinks it quite certain that olive 

 trees and planes, as well as many other kinds, live a very long time. 

 Beyond this platitude he will not go; but it is manifest that he is 

 not in sympathy with the mind of the credulous multitude as to 

 the extreme age of this or that individual and historic tree. He 

 was rather skeptical on the subject, and probably would not have 

 believed it possible that northward in Europe far beyond the 

 Mediterranean oaks sometimes lived through ten or a dozen cen- 

 turies ; nor that on another and unknown side of the world there were 

 conifers^ of considerable dimensions then living which would be flour- 

 ishing still, after the passing of twenty-two or three hundred years. 



Transmutation. In this twentieth century of our era there are 

 farmers in the world, and not unintelligent, who believe that to 

 some seed of wheat or barley after it has been sown in the field 

 something may happen by which it comes to sprout and grow up 

 into a plant of what they call chess, or cheat; a plant known to 

 botanists as Bromus secalinus; this nathe^ itself now apparently 

 destined to perpetuate forever that old opinion — older than his- 

 tory, no doubt — that a grain of barley, secale, may become the 

 parent of a plant of chess. 



The seemingly indicative facts upon which this transmutation 

 theory appears as if it might have established itself in the minds 

 of prehistoric grain growers were several. Neither chess nor 

 darnel grew commonly elsewhere than in the low wet parts of 

 grain fields. In these spots only very few, depauperate, and almost 

 infertile were the stalks of wheat or barley, though the seed of one 

 or the other had been sown there copiously. The explanation which 

 a very primeval and elementary philosophy could offer was, that 

 the grains of wheat, debilitated to the verge of decay by unusual 

 cold and dampness, became unable to generate a better plant than 

 the small-grained and worthless chess, or cheat, as the farmers 

 still call it. Even Nature herself had taught them with what ease 

 she can, and how every year she actually does effect more mar- 

 vellous transformations, at least in the animal kingdom. The 

 fish-like creatures that swim about in pond and pool in the spring 



> The conifers were favorite subjects of study with Theophrastus; and if 

 gome of our Sequoias are rightly estimated to be twenty-five centuries old, 

 they were not small trees in our philosopher's time. 



