PREFACE 



The task of selecting the terms to be included in any branch of 

 science offers many difficulties : in the case of botany, it is 

 closely linked on with zoology and general biology, with geology 

 as regards fossil plants, with pharmacy, chemistry, and the 

 cultivation of plants in the garden or the field. How far it is 

 advisable to include terms from those overlapping sciences which 

 lie on the borderland is a question on which no two people might 

 think alike. I have given every word an independent examina- 

 tion, so as to take in all, in fact, which might be fairly expected, 

 and yet to exclude technical terms which really belong to another 

 science. Words in common use frequently have technical mean- 

 ings, 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 inter- 

 esting for special reasons. Many words only to be found in 

 dictionaries have been passed by; each dictionary I have con- 

 sulted contains words apparently 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 modem 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 " afforded many English equiv- 

 alents of foreign terms. In drawing up definitions, the terms 



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