INTRODUCTION. 
emitted me at their end, barely living. In short, I ransacked 
all the big authorities, old and new, who have dealt with tem- 
perate and mountainous countries ; and, as a result of my fishing 
in these deep waters, I have now come to land with a huge cargo 
of authentic information. 
For yet another difficulty besieges the enthusiast. Even if a 
beautiful plant be fully described and sold to him under one name, 
how is he to be sure that it has a right to bear it, how is he to be 
sure that next year the same plant will not again be sold to him 
at a still higher price, and under a still stranger name? There 
is one way, and one way only, to resolve these doubts ; and that 
is, to go to the original authority. But, in the first place, these 
learned tomes do not lie ready to the zealot’s hand, but rest in the 
dim and dusty gloom of museum shelves; and, in the second, 
experto crede, when he has given up the time and the trouble, 
and has made himself a nuisance to the ever-courteous officials, 
this is a type of what he finds, either in polysyllabic German, or 
else in a cranky compilation of huge Latin epithets: that so- 
and-so is an acaulescent herb of circinate vernation with the 
leaves imparipinnatipartite or uncinate-lyrate with mucronate- 
crenulate lobules, setulose-papillose, decurrent, pedunculate, and 
persistent. After this he goes home to Robinson or Correvon— 
and little blame! It cannot be expected that the amateur, how- 
ever keen his zeal to know his plants, is going to subjugate 
himself to such wearisome jargon of the professional. Yet only 
by this gate can the kingdom of knowledge be entered: all 
priests and all professionals, of every sort and time, have always 
fortified their gate with such frills and chevaua-de-frises of hideous 
forbiddingness. What is this ?—‘ a peripteral Hexastyle with a 
pronaos and a ‘posticum’’; what but the Hephaisteion at 
Athens, rendered in the correct language of the architect. Of all 
sciences, indeed, botany has the worst name for this kind of 
cant, and the words “ botanical description ” arouse shivers in 
the boldest. 
This, however, need not be so, once we have realised that 
the Jargon employed really does mean something, and is, in fact, 
X1ll 
