Guild of Quantitative Botanists

The Guild of Quantitative Botanists (GQB) is a chartered body of the Tower concerned with the enumeration, measurement and reduction to number of all growing things. It is distinct from the Librarian Botanists’ Guild, which catalogues plants, and from the Guild of Vertical Botanists, which studies them by altitude; the GQB studies neither their identity nor their position but their quantities, and holds that a specimen fully described in numbers is fully described. Its charter was granted under Ordinance Gamma-9, a companion instrument to Ordinance Gamma-7, and its seal — a caliper closing on a fern — is struck on the reverse of the Calibrated Athenaeum's lesser doors, a privilege it has never exercised and will not surrender.

The Guild's founding proposition is that no plant is infinite. Every specimen possesses a finite leaf-count, a finite annual increment and a finite number of ways it may be described; the Guild's task is to reach those numbers before the plant changes and renders them obsolete.

History

The Guild separated from the Guild of Quantitative Idealists in 3π/144, after the Idealists declined to extend the Esoteric Calculus to living material on the grounds that living material declines to hold still. The seceding members conceded the difficulty and resolved to solve it by measurement rather than by theory, and have been measuring ever since. The Guild of Exactitude supported the separation and supplied the first standards of tensile measurement for stem and stipe, a debt the GQB acknowledges once annually by letter.

Its early decades were spent in dispute with the Department of Arboreal Reckoning, which claimed all trees of more than forty years' growth on the grounds that a tree which has been counted is henceforth an account. The matter was settled by Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, which divided jurisdiction at the fortieth ring: the Department keeps the rings, the Guild keeps everything the rings produced. Both offices observe the boundary scrupulously and neither will say where on a specimen it is.

Method and the Murmuring Problem

Guild work proceeds by what its manual calls patient repetition. A Measurer-Scribe — the title is shared with the Idealists' grade of the same name, though the two are not interchangeable and their certificates are not honoured across the boundary — counts a specimen repeatedly until successive counts agree. Agreement is not proof of correctness. The Guild's standing caution, printed on the flyleaf of every field book, states: "A plant that has been counted four times is a plant that has heard you."

"The specimen was counted at dawn, at noon and at dusk, giving 1,104, 1,104 and 1,109 leaves. The third figure was retained, as the plant had by then had ample opportunity to consider the matter."

— Field Book 88, entry for 14 Frost, attributed to Measurer-Scribe A. Vellum

The field's central difficulty is what the Guild terms murmuring: the tendency of quantified plant matter to continue producing quantities after the certificate is sealed. Whisper Pine is the standard case, and the Botanists' Guild has long maintained that its botanical character cannot be reduced to figures. The GQB does not dispute the observation and disputes the conclusion.

Dispute with the Taxonomists

The Librarian Botanists’ Guild recognizes three primary variants of lumenmoss, distinguished by morphology. The GQB recognizes the same plant as a single species and distinguishes its variants by Catalogical Velocity (V_c) — the rate at which a specimen's description accumulates — assigning each a numerical grade. The two guilds have issued no joint statement since 3π/present, when a conference at which both were to speak was adjourned for want of a agreed order of papers. The GQB holds that the taxonomists describe without measuring; the taxonomists reply that the Guild measures without looking, and that a fern may be counted perfectly by a clerk who has never learned what a fern is.

The dispute extends to Conceptual Mass. The Guild maintains that a plant's description, once complete, acquires mass in its own right and must be weighed, and it has petitioned the Bureau of Objective Measures for a standard weight of description. The petition is in its fourth recension. The Index of Regrettable Omissions, maintained by the Bureau of Quantitative Esoteria, contains forty-one entries concerning plants the Guild omitted to measure on the ground that they had died.

The Anchor Spore Ruling

The Guild's most-cited instrument is its finding of 3π/283 on the Anchor Spore, which it declined to quantify on the ground that the object's quantities were not its own. The Guild of Vertical Botanists had contested the cataloguing and sought the GQB's support. The Guild's answer — that a thing which borrows its numbers from its surroundings cannot be said to possess them — was adopted by the Statistical School of Numerological Archaeology and has since been applied to stairwells, seals and at least one senior Librarian.

Instruments and daily practice

The Guild keeps its working instruments on Floor 3π/6, in a chamber of low light and steady temperature. Chief among them are the Long Tally, a graduated rail of 11 metres used to count leaves at height; the Increment Frame, a caliper of elm and brass; and the Silent Ledger, in which measurements are entered before they are spoken aloud. The Guild's instruments are inspected each quarter by the Acoustic Permeability sub-office, as the Ledger has been known to record a measurement taken in another room.

Field parties leave the chamber at first light and return before the lamps are trimmed. No counting is undertaken on a floor whose number is not divisible in any stated way, and no Clerk of the Tally may bring glass into the Increment Frame room. The Library does not explain either rule and the Guild has never asked.

The Guild's relations with the Department of Predictive Sustainment remain cordial and largely theoretical. Its census of living material is the largest in the Tower and is reckoned by the Spiral Notation office to hold seven figures, of which four are believed to refer to moss.