VI PREFACE 



entitled, Notes on Edible Plants, left at this Station by the author; a series 

 of articles in the American Naturalist on the history of garden vegetables, 

 running for four years beginning with 1887; and between forty and fifty 

 thousand card index notes which belong in part to this Station and in part 

 to the Missouri Botanical Garden. The material used was written previous 

 to 1892, the author having spent at least a quarter-century in its preparation. 

 The editor must now state what his task has been. 



With so great a wealth of material much has had to be discarded. 

 A great mass of cultural notes has not been used. Descriptions of many 

 varieties of many species were discarded. Vernacular names in many 

 languages and dialects were omitted. Botanical synonyms have had to 

 be left out. Sturtevant's discussions of edible ftingi, while full for the time 

 in which they were written, are, in the light of recent research, so scant and 

 fragmentary that the editor, unable to revise or add to them, has with 

 many regrets excluded them. The unused material amoimts to several 

 times that used. 



After sorting the material, the next task was to arrange it for publication. 

 This work fell into four well-defined divisions of labor: 



First, some standard of botanical nomenclature had to be adopted that 

 the many botanical names from the several hundred authors quoted by 

 Sturtevant could be made to conform as far as possible to one standard. 

 Index Kewensis was taken as the authority best suited for the work in hand ; 

 this standard has seldom been departed from even though departure seemed 

 most necessary in the light of later botanical studies ; to have begim making 

 departures would have entailed too great a task. 



Second, Sturtevant's citations to literature, except in the series of 

 articles in the American Naturalist, usually consist only of the name of 

 the book and the author. Since a book such as this is almost worthless 

 without full citations, these, as far as possible, have been completed and 

 verified, a task requiring borrowed books from a dozen or more libraries 

 and the labor of several persons for months. Even after great effort to 

 insure fullness and correctness, no doubt many mistakes have crept into 

 the citations. 



Third, bibliographical information is given in detail, since to cite 

 unknown authors is a worthless procedure. It seems a simple task to 

 catalog a collection of books. But the difficulties, especially in the case 

 of early books, were found to be many. Anonymous writers, noms de plume, 

 cross-references, borrowed material, numerous editions, works of com- 



