142 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 5 4 



i6. He knew how the annual rings in the stems or trunks of 

 certain woody growths were formed. 



17. Theophrastus, with natural vision unaided by so much as 

 the simplest lens, and without having seen a vegetable cell, yet 

 distinguished clearly between parenchymatous and prosenchym- 

 atous tissues; even correctly relating the distribution of each 

 to the fabrics of pith, bark, wood, leaves, flowers, and fruits. 



This list of facts botanical which Theophrastus saw, and in 

 the main discovered, is not complete, but it embraces well-nigh 

 all the first rudiments of what even to-day is universal scientific 

 botany. It illustrates superabundantly the fact that Theophrastus, 

 and no man of any later time, is the father of the science as we now 

 have and hold it. And in the light of the above partial recapitu- 

 lation of his discoveries, what possible remark could be more inane 

 than this? "If Theophrastus possessed more experimental know- 

 ledge [than Aristotle], he still saw facts in the light of his master's 

 philosophicar doctrines." When a man has firmly laid the foun- 

 dations of a science, and then has added the suggestions of almost 

 the whole superstructure, what faintest shade of pertinency can 

 there be in asking what his philosophic doctrines were ? As reason- 

 ably might one leave any scientific work, alive with new facts, 

 quite unexamined because its author's philosophy was that of a 

 school unpopular, or his creed unorthodox. 



The most generous interpretation of the words quoted would 

 seem to be, that their author, having no knowledge of Theophrastus, 

 thought to absolve himself from the task of acquiring it by trusting 

 that the Greek would never again be found worth studying. 



To me it seems not improbable that historians of the future, 

 learning to know this great founder's mind better than it is yet 

 known, may ag'ree in some judgment not unlike this: that all that 

 has been added to the understanding of plant life and form — ^to 

 morphology, anatomy, physiology, perhaps even to taxonomy — 

 within the last three centuries has been due to the inventions of 

 the opticians, and to the increased number of students and inves- 

 tigators, rather than to the appearing on the botanical horizon, 

 within the modern period, of any one mind in powers of observa- 

 tion, penetration, and sagacity superior to Theophrastus of Eresus. 



Plumier (1703) sought to commemorate Theophrastus in a newly 

 discovered genus of West Indian shrubs, yet was so inconsiderate 

 as to name the genus Eresia. This Linnaeus (1740) changed to 

 Theophrasta. 



