Hence it is that other writers have confined 
     themselves to a verbal description of the plants; indeed 
     some of them have not so much as described them even, 
     but have contented themselves for the most part with a 
     bare recital of their names . . .

     We are confronted here once more with that basic 
function of media—to store and to expedite information. 
Plainly, to store is to expedite, since what is stored is also more 
accessible than what has to be gathered. The fact that visual 
information about flowers and plants cannot be stored verbally 
also points to the fact that science in the Western world has 
long been dependent on the visual factor. Nor is this surprising 
in a literate culture based on the technology of the alphabet, 
one that reduces even spoken language to a visual mode. As 
electricity has created multiple non-visual means of storing and