PREFACE 
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 have 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, where are also 
noted some unusual colour-terms not brought into the present work. 
The total numbers included in this Glossary amount to nearly 
15,000, 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 rough one, for to render adequately all that may be 
conveyed by many of the roots is manifestly impossible when a 
single word must serve. The accent has been added in accordance 
with the best discoverable usage ; where pronunciation varies, I 
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