PREFACE 



in common use frequently have technical meanings, and must be 

 included ; other technical words are foreign to botany, and must 

 be excluded. Thus " entire " must be defined in its botanic 

 sense, and such purely geologic terms as Triassic and Pleistocene 

 must be passed by. The total number of rare alkaloids and 

 similar bodies recorded in pharmacologic and chemical works, if 

 included, would have extended this Glossary to an inconvenient 

 size ; I have therefore only enumerated those best known or of 

 more frequent mention in literature, or interesting for special 

 reasons. Many words only to be found in dictionaries have been 

 passed by ; each dictionary I have consulted contains words ap- 

 parently peculiar to it, and some have been suspected of being 

 purposely coined to round off a set of terms. 



The foundations of the list here presented are A. Gray's 

 " Botanical Text-Book," Lindley's " Glossary," and Henslow's 

 " Dictionary," as set forth in the Bibliography. To these terms 

 have been added others extant in the various modern text-books 

 and current literature, noted in the course of reading, or found 

 by special search. The abstracts published in the Journal of the 

 Royal Microscopical Society have afforded many English equivalents 

 of foreign terms. In drawing up definitions, the terms used to 

 denote colour were found to be so discordant that I was compelled 

 to make a special study of that department, and the result will be 

 found in the Journal of Botany, xxxvii. (1899) 97-105, where are also 

 noted some unusual colour-terms not brought into the present work. 



The total numbers included in this Glossary amount to nearly 

 15,000, that is, nearly three times as many as in any other previous 

 work in the language. The derivations have been carefully 

 checked, but as this book has no pretension to be a philological 

 work, the history of the word is not attempted ; thus in "etiolate " 

 I have contented myself with giving the proximate derivation, 

 whilst the great Oxford dictionary cites a host of intermediate 

 forms deduced from stipella. The meaning appended to the roots is 

 naturally a rough one, for to render adequately all that may be 

 conveyed by many of the roots is manifestly impossible when a 

 single word must serve. The accent has been added in accordance 

 with the best discoverable usage ; where pronunciation varies, I 



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