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 
Royal 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 
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