412 Transactions. 



(5.) Accentuation or stressing offers innumerable and often insuperable 

 difficulties. The English rule of accentuation, which the genius of the 

 language absolutely demands, draws the stress as far back as possible, 

 often placing it in situations most awkward for any tongue other than 

 an English one ; and English stresses or emphasizes one or two syllables 

 in a polysyllable at the expense of the rest to a degree unknown in any 

 other language, so that, even if every vowel be given its correct Latin 

 (Continental) value, the word may yet be pronounced in such a way as 

 to be completely delatinized and to seem unintelligible to any but a Briton 

 {PiUos'porum, Meli'cytus, macroph' ylla, Orthoc'enis), especially as the vowel- 

 values themselves alter enormously according to the incidence of the stress — 

 e.g., in macroph' ylla and o in nohile. This linguistic instinct is most profound, 

 and amounts to a physical compulsion which can be resisted only by a very 

 few specially constituted persons. It also a2)pears to work inconsistently, 

 as it does in ordinary English ; thus we tend to place the stress in the 

 " English position " in pronouncing, say, Pteros'tylis, Hypol'epis, m,ultif'idum, 

 Gypsoph'ila, Hype'ricum (and in most words which are in general or everyday 

 use, e.g., by gardeners), but not in Gloss' ostig' ma, He'lichry'sum, Leu'copo'gon, 

 mac'roca'lyx, &c., where the weight of the first or the third syllable, or the 

 nature of the consonantal bridges, renders the " Englisli " })ronunciation 

 difficult or impossible. And there is here no line to be drawn ; individual 

 practice varies largely. These difficulties are far greater than those, so 

 much discussed in the past, which depend upon the quantity of the 

 vowel (as in the case of Clematis or Clematis, and Gladiolus or Gladiolus). 

 However hard it may be to learn, an even or nearly even distribution of 

 the stresses must be accjuired if anything like a Latin pronunciation is 

 to be acliieved, and this point will have to be specially attended to in 

 the teaching of Latin in the schools. We must learn, that is, to say 

 brachycome, not brachy'come ; cyperaceae, not sai'perei'sil ; himenofilum, 

 not hai'menofi'lum or haimenof'ilum ; abrotanella, not ab'rotanel'la ; 

 bukanani, not biukan'^nai ; ligustikum. not ligus'tikum ; aromatikum, not 

 ar'omat'ikum. 



(6.) A great part of the technical vocabulary of botany is the same, 

 in its elements, as that of the other sciences — biology, chemistry, palaeon- 

 tology, &c. — and whatever system is adopted for any one of these must 

 also be adopted for all. The very names zoology, biology, and palaeontology, 

 in their usual anglicized pronunciation, serve to illustrate and emphasize 

 the great difficulties involved in any such scheme, since it would seem 

 absurd to call a science biology (baiolodzhi) and to s])eak, within the 

 science, of biogenesis instead of baiodzhenisis. The problem is thus further 

 complicated, for it is essential that there should be complete unanimity 

 and agreement in practice among all the members, for instance, of the 

 staffs of the University colleges and of all technical institutions, agricul- 

 tural and experimental colleges where the sciences are taught. Tlie (juestion 

 is tl\us seen to be only a part of a very much bigger one. 



(7.) Though this paper deals specially with the names of New Zealand 

 plants, tlie whole vocabulary of botanical science is, of course, involved. 

 In this case, as in that of any other science, a certain part of this vocabulary 

 has already passed into ordinary speech and is anglicized in sound. This 

 is no constant (juantity ; at any time, for any out of very many reasons, 

 terms of any science pass over from the teclmical to the everyday usage, 

 and there is usually a fairly large number of terms, at any given moment 

 of time, in the vocabulary of any science which are indeterminate in this 



