Awarded Second Place

Aristotle, Theophrastus,
 and Strato discuss biology

It's not easy being a second-stringer.  Especially today -- when being a celebrity is so highly rated -- those who have done well but are not "tops" easily fall into the great hall of the virtually forgotten.  One such scientist was named Theophrastus, and he lived in ancient Greece from about 372 to 287 B.C.E.  He was a pupil of Aristotle, and easily falls into that great man's shadow.  Anyone with a college-level education should know the name "Aristotle."  Few are even expected to learn the name "Theophrastus."  And yet, Theophrastus was called the "father of botany" by Linnaeus, the 18th-century scientist who developed modern biology's system for classifying species.

After Aristotle died, Theophrastus led the school Aristotle had created, continuing to teach not only botany but also zoology, physiology, physics, ethics, and the history of culture.  Today, we'd need a separate professor for each of those subjects, but Theophrastus strengthened the sense of unity among those various subject areas.  The school actually reached its peak attendance during his leadership.

Although Theophrastus wrote several books as a way of deepening education, the ones that had the most lasting influence were those about botany, such as Natural History of Plants and Reasons for Vegetable Growth.  He classified almost 500 plants, not just as an abstract subject, but also relating it to human cultivation, grafting, and propagation.  Even though Theophrastus is mostly forgotten today, some current scientific terminology still shows traces of the names he used for flowers and their parts.

It seems to me that it is not only Theophrastus who falls into an easily forgotten second place.  Plants do too.  On television nature documentaries, IMAX movies, and save-the-species campaigns, it is animals, not plants, that get most of the attention.  A panda is so much more cuddly than any plant (especially more than poison ivy).  In contrast, a lion is a better model than a plant for a child's nice stuffed toy (even though the lion is a predator that kills other mammals that we adore).

Part of the reason for this discrimination against plants obviously lies in animals' being much more animated -- the very basis for our word "animal."  That difference cannot be overcome even by time-lapse photography, which can make flowers at least appear to unfold, and plants appear to grow as fast as animals actually move.

Despite the second place that plants get in our attention, we and all animals depend in some way upon them, such as the oxygen for breathing that green plants give off.  In the late 19th century, the American biologist Asa Gray paid a tribute to plants in the opening pages of a botany book he wrote for young people.  Gray was himself a second-stringer among advocates for Darwin's theory of evolution, taking second place to Thomas Huxley.  Nevertheless, Gray knew the importance of plants, writing:

"The clothing of the earth with plants and flowers --
at once so beautiful and so useful, so essential to all animal life --
is one of the very ways in which [God] takes care of his creatures."

~~~

Has any houseplant, shrub, vine, or tree played a particular role in your life?  What?

(The Gray quote is in his Botany for Young People [1872]

 as quoted in Song of a Scientist by Calvin B. DeWitt, © 2004.  p. 21.)

(The photo of the three teachers is in the public domain, being a reproduction of art whose copyright has expired.)