The impulse to analyse the plant into component members seems, in the first instance, to have arisen out of the desire to establish a comparison between construction in the animal and the vegetable body; for the existence of a close analogy between the two was a fundamental postulate with the biologists of ancient Greece. The first extant attempt at such an analysis is, in some respects, strikingly alien to modern botanical thought. It is that of Theophrastus who, in the fourth century b.c., stated that “the primary and most important parts… are these—root, stem, branch, twig; these are the parts into which we might divide the plant, regarding them as members, corresponding to the members of animals: for each of these is distinct in character from the rest, and together they make up the whole”. Theophrastus then proceeds to distinguish, as subsidiary parts, the leaf, flower, fruit, etc. He was influenced in this discrimination by the fact that, in the tree, which he took as the standard of plant life, the trunk and its branches persist permanently, whereas the leaf, flower and fruit are ephemeral. The importance of the leaf was destined to remain for long unrecognised, and it was not until Goethe turned his attention to botany, more than two thousand years later, that the equivalence of the foliage leaves and the parts of the flower came fully into the light.