PREFACE 



have tried to follow the best usage; in some words such as 

 "medullary" I have given the accent as it is always spoken, though 

 all the dictionaries, except Henslow's, accent it as " med'ullary." 

 When words have become thoroughly anglicised, it would have been 

 mere pedantry to accent them otherwise ; we say or'ator, not as in 

 Latin, orator. The accent does not imply syllabic division, but 

 when the accent immediately follows a vowel, that vowel is long ; 

 if one or more consonants intervene, then the vowel is short ; thus 

 ca'nus, cas'sus, as though they were printed cd-nus, cds-sus ; in a few 

 instances the pronunciation is also given when the word would 

 otherwise be doubtful as to sound. 



The word having grown so much under my hands, it has been 

 my duty to condense the definitions, a difficult matter in many 

 cases, when a longer explanation would have been far easier to 

 draw up. I trust that I have in each case succeeded in setting out 

 the main or central meaning, but many writers have their own 

 modified or restricted meaning of even well-known terms. To still 

 further economise space, words drawn from the same leading word 

 have been grouped into paragraphs, thus obviating the necessity of 

 repeating the leading word with its meaning many times over, and 

 only requiring the additional root to be given ; occasionally this 

 has led to the intentional neglect of strict alphabetic sequence. 

 The names of groups of plants have given much trouble ; whilst all 

 proposed terms manifestly could not be included, many have be- 

 come so often quoted as to demand recognition ; as a rule I have 

 not admitted groups of even ordinal value, still less of lower rank. 

 Compound terms have been left out when intermediate between the 

 meaning of the primitives ; those included seem to require mention 

 on special grounds. 



Authors' names in parentheses, following definitions, are those 

 who have been taken as authority for such definition, and when 

 the actual language is used, it is indicated by quotation marks ; 

 the authority sometimes coincides with the inventor of the term. 

 Substantives in the headings have been shown by the use of a 

 capital letter, adjectives and other parts of speech by a small letter ; 

 exceptions being adjectives drawn from a proper name as "Dar- 

 winian," and those which form part of such terms as "Conjoint 



ix 



