PREFACE 



which lie on the borderland is a question on which no two 

 people might think alike. I have given every word an indepen- 

 dent examination, so as to take in all which seemed needful, 

 all, in fact, which might be fairly expected, and yet to exclude 

 technical terms which really belong to another science. Words 

 in common use frequently have technical meanings, and must be 

 included; other technical words are foreign to botany, and must 

 be excluded. Thus "entire" must be defined in its botanic 

 sense, and such purely geologic terms as Triassic and Pleistocene 

 must be passed by. The total number of rare alkaloids and 

 similar bodies recorded in pharmacologic and chemical works, if 

 included, would have extended this Glossary to an inconvenient 

 size; I have therefore only enumerated those best known or of 

 more frequent mention in literature, or interesting for special 

 reasons. Many words only to be found in dictionaries have been 

 passed by; each dictionary I have consulted contains words ap- 

 parently peculiar to it, and some have been suspected of being 

 purposely coined to round off a set of terms. 



The foundations of the list here presented are A. Gray's 

 "Botanical Text-Book," Lindley's "Glossary," and Henslow's 

 "Dictionary," as set forth in the Bibliography. To these terms 

 have been added others extant in the various modern text-books 

 and current literature, noted in the course of reading, or found 

 by special search. The abstracts published in the " Journal of the 

 Eoyal Microscopical Society " afforded many English equivalents of 

 foreign terms. In drawing up definitions, the terms used to denote 

 colour were found to be so discordant that I was compelled to make 

 a special study of that department, and the result will be found in 

 the "Journal of Botany," xxxvii. (1899) 97-105. 



The total numbers included in this Glossary amount to about 

 16,000, that is, nearly three times as many as in any other previous 

 work in the language. The derivations have been carefully checked, 

 but as this book has no pretension to be a philological work, the 

 history of the word is not attempted; thus in "etiolate" I have 

 contented myself with giving the proximate derivation, whilst the 

 great Oxford dictionary cites a host of intermediate forms deduced 

 from stipella. The meaning appended to the roots is naturally a 



