TWO NEW TERMS 



CORMOPHYTASTER AND XENIOPHYTE 



AXIOMATICALLY FUNDAMENTAL IN BOTANY 



By WILLIAM TRELEASE. 

 (Read April 14, igi6.) 



A generation ago botany possessed in the popular mind the 

 unenviable reputation of being a dictionary study because of the 

 rather large vocabulary necessitated by precise organography, though 

 its terms were mostly self-evident to one possessing knowledge of 

 the proper or current meaning of Latin roots. The specialization in 

 biology that the last quarter-century has brought about has revealed 

 so many new facts and ideas calling for equal precision that its 

 burden of verbiage has grown inordinately, largely through the 

 coining of Greek derivatives from roots not always used with apt 

 differential meaning, e. g., many words, of which I shall use several 

 monotonously, in which the omnipresent "phyte" and "sperm" 

 appear. This has grown, sometimes quite unnecessarily, to such a 

 degree that a general biologist is likely to be puzzled by the language 

 of a general treatise on either botany or zoology, while current pub- 

 lications on the newer branches of botany may be all but meaning- 

 less to a person familiar with the science at large, — sometimes, it 

 must be confessed, when the essential ideas might have been con- 

 veyed in language intelligible to people of unspecialized training, 

 and entirely free from technicalities. 



Though I share the popular horror of pedantry or unnecessary 

 technicality in expression, and would reduce rather than increase the 

 vocabulary of specialization, it should not be understood that I fail 

 to see that new knowledge and thought call for new expression, quite 

 as much as new and varied tools became necessary as the rough 

 construction of the stone age passed into the refined shaping of 

 wood and metal that characterizes the age of steel ; and the purpose 



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