PREFACE TO THE THIRD AMERICAN EDITION XV 



improve that part of the book excepting in minor details. The reader will 

 appreciate the fact, however, that there is available an enormous wealth of 

 knowledge not adequately presented in Part II, which may be approached 

 through other treatises on plant physiology such as those mentioned in the 

 list of references that follows this note. 



There is much discrepancy in the English spelling of Russian proper names. 

 This matter will require more serious attention from scholarly scientific writers 

 in the future than has been accorded it in the past, and an attempt is here made 

 at least to avoid the exacerbation of a condition that is already bad enough. 

 The difficulty has perhaps arisen mainly through the fact that our acquaint- 

 ance with Russian science is almost wholly based on writings in other foreign 

 languages, especially in French and German. We have too frequently taken 

 the German or French transliteration, as the case may be, without regard to 

 the fact that this almost always leads to mispronunciation by the English 

 reader. Thus, Pavlov often appears as Pawlow, which is as incorrect in English 

 as it is correct in German. The name of the author of the present volume 

 furnishes another example; we have W. Palladin where we should have V. 

 Palladin. (In this particular case, the silent final e of the Russian and of the 

 French form of this name should be dropped in English, to avoid the resulting 

 lengthening of the last syllable and even the misplacing of the accent, which is 

 penultimate. The name is pronounced Pal-lad'-in, 1 like Aladdin.) 



In those cases where it is quite clear that a proper name ought to be regarded 

 as Russian, an English spelling is here adopted that will lead to no serious 

 ambiguity as to pronunciation and that can be readily retransformed into the 

 Russian. In these transliterations of Russian words into English the rules of the 

 U. S. Library of Congress have been followed, with a few slight modifications, 

 as follows: ia, iu, ie are all given as ia, in, ie; i, t and I are all given as i; the 

 sign of the silent letter between two others (') is omitted (Kresnoselskaia is 

 used instead of Krasnosel' skaia) and Yegunov is employed instead of Egunov, 

 to insure proper pronunciation. When the name is not certainly Russian 

 and when several spellings occur, the commonest form occurring in the German 

 book is adopted. In those cases where the paper cited is in Russian the author's 

 name is transliterated into English in the citation, as well as in the text, the 

 title of the paper being translated into English unless a title in French or 

 German is available. In citations from languages other than Russian, author's 

 names are given just as they occur in the publications cited. The two or three 

 spellings that thus occur for the same Russian name are all given in the index, 

 with the requisite cross-references. Thus, references to Ivanov are all given 

 under this spelling, but IvanojJ and Iwanow are also given, with the notation, 

 "see Ivanov." 



The index is somewhat more comprehensive than is the case with the 



German edition, and authors' names have been inserted in the same alphabet 



with the names of subjects. This feature of the index amounts practically to 



a bibliography; references are given to all pages where the name in question is 



1 This is authoritative, from Professor Palladin himself shortly before his death. 



