Part 9

In general we may say that his physiology is on a much lower plane than his natural history, since in dealing with physiological questions he always seems to have in mind the body as a whole and seldom pauses for any detailed investigation of a particular part. The physiological views of Aristotle were far from being fully accepted even by the generation which followed him. There was already growing up a school of physiologists whose work culminated five centuries later in that of Galen, where we find quite other views of the bodily functions. It is these views which we may take as more typical of the bases of Greek physiology (see p. 66).

In much of the Aristotelian material that we have discussed we have seen the development of a class of interests very foreign to those of the modern biologist, in whose work the general discussion of the ultimate nature and origin of life seldom plays a large part. The business of the modern biologist is mainly with vital phenomena as he encounters them and he is not concerned with the deeper philosophical problems. The man of science considers a part of the Universe where the philosopher makes it his business to regard the whole. With Aristotle this modern scientific process of taking a part of the sensible Universe, such as a particular group of animals or the particular action of a particular organ, and considering it in and by and for itself without reference to other things, had not yet fully emerged. Philosophy and science are still inextricably linked and there is no clear demarcation between them.

This is at least his theoretical view. But besides being a philosopher by choice he was a supreme naturalist by his natural endowments and he cannot suppress his love for nature and his capacity for observation. We see Aristotle the naturalist at his greatest as a direct observer or when reasoning directly about the observations that he has made. When he disregards his own observations and begins to erect theories on the observations or the views of others, he becomes weaker and less comprehensible.

§ 3. After Aristotle

All Aristotle’s surviving biological works refer primarily to the animal creation. His work on plants is lost or rather has survived as the merest corrupted fragment. We are fortunate, however, in the possession of a couple of complete works by his pupil and successor Theophrastus (372-287), which may not only be taken to represent the Aristotelian attitude towards the plant world, but also give us an inkling of the general state of biological science in the generation which succeeded the master.

These treatises of Theophrastus are in many respects the most complete and orderly of all ancient biological works that have reached our time. They give an idea of the kind of interest that the working scientist of that day could develop when inspired rather by the genius of a great teacher than by the power of his own thoughts. Theophrastus is a pedestrian where Aristotle is a creature of wings, he is in a relation to the master of the same order that the morphologists of the second half of the nineteenth century were to Darwin. For a couple of generations after the appearance of the Origin of Species in 1859 the industry and ability of naturalists all over the world were occupied in working out in detail the structure and mode of life of living things on the basis of the Evolutionary philosophy. Nearly all the work on morphology and much of that on physiology since his time might be treated as a commentary on the works of Darwin. These volumes of Theophrastus give the same impression. They represent the remains—alas, almost the only biological remains—of a school working under the impulse of a great idea and spurred by the memory of a great teacher. As such they afford a parallel to much scientific work of our own day, produced by men without genius save that provided by a vision and a hope and an ideal. Of such men it is impossible to write as of Aristotle. Their lives are summed up by their actual achievement, and since Theophrastus is an orderly writer whose works have descended to us in good state, he is a very suitable instance of the actual standard of achievement of ancient biology. ‘Without vision the people perish’ and the very breath of life of science is drawn, and can only be drawn, from that very small band of prophets who from time to time, during the ages, have provided the great generalizations and the great ideals. In this light let us examine the work of Theophrastus.

In the absence of any adequate system of classification, almost all botany until the seventeenth century consisted mainly of descriptions of species. To describe accurately a leaf or a root in the language in ordinary use would often take pages. Modern botanists have invented an elaborate terminology which, however hideous to eye and ear, has the crowning merit of helping to abbreviate scientific literature. Botanical writers previous to the seventeenth century were substantially without this special mode of expression. It is partly to this lack that we owe the persistent attempts throughout the centuries to represent plants pictorially in herbals, manuscript and printed, and thus the possibility of an adequate history of plant illustration.

Theophrastus seems to have felt acutely the need of botanical terms, and there are cases in which he seeks to give a special technical meaning to words in more or less current use. Among such words are carpos = fruit, pericarpion = seed vessel = pericarp, and metra, the word used by him for the central core of any stem whether formed of wood, pith, or other substance. It is from the usage of Theophrastus that the exact definition of fruit and pericarp has come down to us. We may easily discern also the purpose for which he introduces into botany the term metra, a word meaning primarily the womb, and the vacancy in the Greek language which it was made to fill. ‘Metra,’ he says, ‘is that which is in the middle of the wood, being third in order from the bark and like to the marrow in bones. Some call it the heart (καρδίαν), others the inside (ἐντεριώνην), yet others call only the innermost part of the metra itself the heart, while others again call this marrow.’ He is thus inventing a word to cover all the different kinds of core and importing it from another study. This is the method of modern scientific nomenclature which hardly existed for botanists even as late as the sixteenth century of our era. The real foundations of our modern nomenclature were laid in the later sixteenth and in the seventeenth century by Cesalpino and Joachim Jung.

It is possible that Theophrastus derived the word pericarp from Aristotle. Cp. De anima, ii. 1, 412ᵇ 2. In the passage τὸ φύλλον περικαρπίου σκέπασμα, τὸ δὲ περικάρπιον καρποῦ, in the De anima the word does not, however, seem to have the full technical force that Theophrastus gives to it.

Historia plantarum, i. 2, vi.

Theophrastus understood the value of developmental study, a conception derived from his master. ‘A plant’, he says, ‘has power of germination in all its parts, for it has life in them all, wherefore we should regard them not for what they are but for what they are becoming.’ The various modes of plant reproduction are correctly distinguished in a way that passes beyond the only surviving earlier treatise that deals in detail with the subject, the Hippocratic work On generation. ‘The manner of generation of trees and plants are these: spontaneous, from a seed, from a root, from a piece torn off, from a branch or twig, from the trunk itself, or from pieces of the wood cut up small.’ The marvel of generation must have awakened admiration from a very early date. We have already seen it occupying a more ancient author, and it had also been one of the chief pre-occupations of Aristotle. It is thus not remarkable that the process should impress Theophrastus, who has left on record his views on the formation of the plant from the seed.

Ibid. i. 1, iv.

Historia plantarum, ii. 1, i.

‘Some germinate, root and leaves, from the same point, some separately from either end of the seed. Thus wheat, barley, spelt, and all such cereals [germinate] from either end, corresponding to the position [of the seed] in the ear, the root from the stout lower part, the shoot from the upper; but the two, root and stem, form a single continuous whole. The bean and other leguminous plants are not so, but in them root and stem are from the same point, namely, their place of attachment to the pod, where, it is plain, they have their origin. In some cases there is a process, as in beans, chick peas, and especially lupines, from which the root grows downward, the leaf and stem upward.... In certain trees the bud first germinates within the seed, and, as it increases in size, the seeds split—all such seeds are, as it were, in two halves; again, all those of leguminous plants have plainly two lobes and are double—and then the root is immediately thrust out. But in cereals, the seeds being in one piece, this does not happen, but the root grows a little before [the shoot].

‘Barley and wheat come up monophyllous, but peas, beans, and chick peas polyphyllous. All leguminous plants have a single woody root, from which grow slender side roots ... but wheat, barley, and the other cereals have numerous slender roots by which they are matted together.... There is a contrast between these two kinds; the leguminous plants have a single root and have many side-growths above from the [single] stem ... while the cereals have many roots and send up many shoots, but these have no side-shoots.’

There can be no doubt that here is a piece of minute observation on the behaviour of germinating seeds. The distinction between dicotyledons and monocotyledons is accurately set forth, though the stress is laid not so much on the cotyledonous character of the seed as on the relation of root and shoot. In the dicotyledons root and shoot are represented as springing from the same point, and in monocotyledons from opposite poles in the seed.

No further effective work was done on the germinating seed until the invention of the microscope, and the appearance of the work of Highmore (1613-85), and the much more searching investigations of Malpighi (1628-94) and Grew (1641-1712) after the middle of the seventeenth century. The observations of Theophrastus are, however, so accurate, so lucid, and so complete that they might well be used as legends for the plates of these writers two thousand years after him.

Historia plantarum, viii. 1, i.

Nathaniel Highmore, A History of Generation, London, 1651.

Marcello Malpighi, Anatome plantarum, London, 1675.

Nehemiah Grew, Anatomy of Vegetables begun, London, 1672.

Much has been written as to the knowledge of the sex of plants among the ancients. It may be stated that of the sexual elements of the flower no ancient writer had any clear idea. Nevertheless, sex is often attributed to plants, and the simile of the Loves of Plants enters into works of the poets. Plants are frequently described as male and female in ancient biological writings also, and Pliny goes so far as to say that some students considered that all herbs and trees were sexual. Yet when such passages can be tested it will be found that these so-called males and females are usually different species. In a few cases a sterile variety is described as the male and a fertile as the female. In a small residuum of cases diœcious plants or flowers are regarded as male and female, but with no real comprehension of the sexual nature of the flowers. There remain the palms, in which the knowledge of plant sex had advanced a trifle farther. ‘With dates’, says Theophrastus, ‘the males should be brought to the females; for the males make the fruit persist and ripen, and this some call by analogy to use the wild fig (ὀλυνθάζειν). The process is thus: when the male is in flower they at once cut off the spathe with the flower and shake the bloom, with its flower and dust, over the fruit of the female, and, if it is thus treated, it retains the fruit and does not shed it.’ The fertilizing character of the spathe of the male date palm was familiar in Babylon from a very early date. It is recorded by Herodotus and is represented by a frequent symbol on the Assyrian monuments.

Pliny, Naturalis historia, xiii. 4.

The curious word ὀλυνθάζειν, here translated to use the wild fig, is from ὄλυνθος, a kind of wild fig which seldom ripens. The special meaning here given to the word is explained in another work of Theophrastus, De causis plantarum, ii. 9, xv. After describing caprification in figs, he says τὸ δὲ ἐπὶ τῶν φοινίκων συμβαῖνον οὐ ταὐτὸν μέν, ἔχει δέ τινα ὁμοιότητα τούτω δι’ ὁ καλοῦσιν ὀλυνθάζειν αὐτούς. ‘The same thing is not done with dates, but something analogous to it, whence this is called ὀλυνθάζειν’.

Historia plantarum, ii. 8, iv.

Herodotus i. 193.

The comparison of the fertilization of the date palm to the use of the wild fig refers to the practice of Caprification. Theophrastus tells us that there are certain trees, the fig among them, which are apt to shed their fruit prematurely. To remedy this ‘the device adopted is caprification. Gall-insects come out of the wild figs which are hanging there, eat the tops of the cultivated figs, and so make them swell’. These gall-insects ‘are engendered from the seeds’. Theophrastus distinguished between the process as applied to the fig and the date, observing that ‘in both [fig and date] the male aids the female—for they call the fruit-bearing female—but whilst in the one there is a union of the two sexes, in the other things are different’.

Historia plantarum, ii. 8, i.