How a stone gets inside a tree

Theophrastus of Eresus (c. 371–c. 287 BCE), a Greek naturalist from the island of Lesbos, examines the structure of timber in his study of plants. In the course of his account he comes upon something nobody would mistake for a part of the tree itself. A stone lies surrounded by wood. To the person who finds it when a trunk is sawn open, it may look as though it has always been there. Theophrastus tells its history from the other end.

An opening that once faced outwards

[…] if one makes a hole in a tree and puts a stone into it or some other such thing, it becomes buried, being completely enveloped by the wood which grows all round it […]

– Theophrastus of Eresus, Enquiry into Plants, 1916, p. 431.^[1]

At first the spot is accessible. Someone can make an opening and put something into it. Only subsequent growth makes that opening disappear. This small experiment answers a question that a single piece of timber would leave unresolved. The eventual position of an object tells us little about its original position. Part of what we now see as the closed interior of a trunk was once an exposed surface.

An olive tree at Megara

Theophrastus sets beside his example a report from Megara. People had hung offerings on a wild olive tree, and the wood grew around them. The offerings had a religious meaning for the people who placed them there. For the comparison with the stone, what matters is that their attachment belongs to an earlier time. The same piece of wood can thus preserve two histories, the growth of a tree and a human gesture. A stone makes the point particularly clearly because its shape is still recognizable long after any trace of the original opening has disappeared.