This man was an eminent botanist, and--eminent or not--he nearly jumped with joy when he'd opened the box, unsealed the container, plucked away the cotton, and saw the plant lying there. It was dead, insofar as he knew, and apparently useless except perhaps as a club, but the botanist was delighted to receive it. Through his head passed notions of cutting it in two, then polishing the twin cut surfaces, and studying the cell structure, so that he might compare its construction with similar--if there were any--plants of Earth, and then write a learned thesis about it which would be read only by other eminent botanists, who would all then curse their luck for not having been friends with any engineers on the moon. The whole procedure--taking the cosmic view--was almost pointless, but it would make the botanist happy, at least. * * * * * However, after setting up his instruments, and placing the plant in a sort of padded vise to steady it against the invasion of its privacy, he chanced to see a bit of root, broken off by sheer unaccustomed weight on the planet, lying upon the lab table, and he placed that beneath the glass lens of his microscope and studied it instead. "I'll be damned!" he said. "The plasm is _liquid_!" A few dozen of the shattered cells had indeed let their contents spill out onto the slide of his 'scope. "I wonder," he mused, "if it is viable?" Wouldn't _that_ make for an interesting paper, he went on, building his dreams upon dreams. A moonplant! Growing in my garden! He decided, as is the way with botanists, to name his--it was now "his"; having abandoned liberty when it abandoned the moon--to name his plant after himself. And that's how it came to be called the "Peter W. Merrill Moonplant." He put it in his garden, arranged a small protective wire cylinder around it, and sprinkled it with water. Then he went into the house to start typing up his notes for that forthcoming paper. * * * * * As he lay there in the soft loam, feeling the cool trickling of the water passing over his stiff tendrils, the newly christened Pete felt a stirring within himself. The sunlight that now struck him was filtered by an atmosphere, and gentle in its action upon him. Pete prodded his memory, and suddenly decided that silicates, after all, are not the most comfortable of linings for one's tender green cells. He seemed to recall a state of lush, sybaritic softness, in pre-silicate times. Decidedly, the silicates must go, thought Pete. And go they did, molecule by molecule, down into the earth through his roots, which were now acting as tiny spigots, getting rid of the scratchy stuff that had bolstered the cell walls against change for millennia past, leaving Pete softer, greener, livelier, and a constant delight to the heart of Peter W. Merrill the First, whenever he came out to tend his plant, between pages of his thesis.