Carefully, the fossil—so he presumed—was cut away from the rock in which it was rooted, and laid gently in a bed of soft cotton, and that bed in a plastic casing, and the casing in a metal box. The box was loaded aboard a spaceship and sent to a man back on Earth.
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.