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TERMINOLOGY AND NOMENCLATURE © 315 
plants, than would otherwise be possible. The unusual 
fullness of their special vocabulary enables botanists to tell 
what they know in the fewest possible words and with least 
danger of being misunderstood. False ideas are the greatest 
hindrance to the pursuit of knowledge; and whatever will 
lessen the danger of these, especially to the beginner, is sure 
to save labor in the end. 
We have already seen (page 4) that the practice of hav- 
ing a double name for each species, instead of giving twice 
as much to remember as if the name of each sort were a 
single word, almost halves the burden upon one’s memory 
that one-word names would impose. The ease with which 
words are remembered depends, as we know, largely upon 
how frequently the word is encountered; hence, the student 
is helped not a little by the circumstance that a large majority 
of specific names are the very words from which the descrip- 
tive terms in common use have been derived. Further- 
more, these descriptive terms, as well as the names of the 
parts of plants and of genera and other groups, are in large 
part made up of a comparatively small number of Latin and 
Greek words, which once learned serve as helpful aids to the 
memory, and, indeed, often enable the student to tell at sight 
the meaning of a new botanical word. 
In our study of systematic botany we shall learn the 
more important descriptive terms as we need them in de- 
veloping a general idea of the natural classification of plants. 
The student will learn how to distinguish some of the more 
important families and higher groups, so that when he ex- 
amines a plant he can tell at least the sub-kingdom to which 
it belongs, usually also the class, sometimes the order, often 
the family, and in certain cases even the genus and species. 
At first we shall confine our study to those plants which 
produce flowers and seeds, leaving for later consideration the 
groups including ferns, mosses, lichens, mushrooms, and sea- 
weeds. 
