Page:Enquiry into plants (Volume 1).pdf/65

 the appearance itself of the plant. I mean differences such as those in size, hardness, smoothness or their opposites, as seen in bark, leaves, and the other parts; also, in general, differences as to comeliness or its opposite and as to the production of good or of inferior fruit. For the wild kinds appear to bear more fruit, for instance, the wild pear and wild olive, but the cultivated plants better fruit, having even flavours which are sweeter and pleasanter and in general better blended, if one may so say.

These then as has been said, are differences of natural character, as it were, and still more so are those between fruitless and fruitful, deciduous and evergreen plants, and the like. But with all the differences in all these cases we must take into account the locality, and indeed it is hardly possible to do otherwise. Such differences would seem to give us a kind of division into classes, for instance, between that of aquatic plants and that of plants of the dry land, corresponding to the division which we make in the case of animals. For there are some plants which cannot live except in wet; and again these are distinguished from one another by their fondness for different kinds of wetness; so that some grow in marshes, others in lakes, others in rivers, others even in the sea, smaller ones in our own sea, larger ones in the Red Sea. Some again, one may say, are lovers of very wet places, or plants of the marshes, such as the willow and the plane. Others again cannot live at all in water, but seek out dry places; and of the smaller sorts there are some that prefer the shore.