never any serious attempt made to carefully compile the various 

 native plant names, and therefore the present list, though drawn 

 from many sources, is comparatively incomplete. By far the 

 greater number of names in the present enumeration are those of 

 the Tagalog language, while of many of the dialects spoken in 

 the Archipelago not a single plant name has ever been recorded. 



It is probable that the people of the mountain tribes, the Ne- 

 gritos, the Igorrotes, the Mangyanes, etc., employ even a greater 

 variety of names in specifying the various species of plants than do 

 the more civilized tribes of the lands at lower elevations, but little 

 or no attention has ever been given to the names used by these 

 peoples. The limitations of the present enumeration can best be 

 realized from the fact that most of the names here recorded are 

 from perhaps 12 or 15 of the 70 or 80 dialects spoken by the various 

 peoples of the Archipelago. With the great variation of the names 

 in the same dialect, and the great number of dialects spoken in the 

 Archipelago, the task of compiling a complete or nearly complete 

 dictionary of the native plant names of the Archipelago is an 

 unending one, and one that could be completed only with great 

 difficulty even if the subject were of sufficient importance to war- 

 rant it. 



Previously but two attempts have been made to compile any 

 extensive lists of the plant names used by the natives of the Archi- 

 pelago. The first was Vigil's "Diccionario, " a pamphlet of 50 

 pages published in the year 1879, which enumerates about 2,400 

 names, the identifications being largely based on Blanco's "Flora 

 de Filipinas." The second list is that given by Vidal in Appen- 

 dix II to his "Sinopsis," where he enumerates al>out 1,800 names 

 of tree species, giving tne generic identifications only. Blanco, 

 in his index to the native names given in his "Flora," gives but a 

 small per cent of the total number enumerated in his text, while 

 F.-Villar gives no index to the native names in his "Novissima 

 Appendix, ' ' 



The words "puti" or "maputi" (white) and "pula" or "ma- 

 pula" (red) are frequently used in combination with other words 

 to designate certain species, as are also the words "lalaqui" (man), 

 "babaye" (woman), "dagat" (ocean), "itim" (black), "usd" 

 (deer), "aso" (dog), "bundoc" or "gubat" (forest), and other 

 words. The prefix "mala" is used in the sense that we use the 

 word "false" — "malaacle" is "false acle," "malabanaba" is "false 



