An Editor's Prologue, 
a scientific word is as common a trick with them as 
it was with Humpty Dumpty when he puzzled Alice by 
using portmanteau words on the other side of the looking- 
glass. And the consequence is that the etymologist is 
often distracted in his endeavours to trace the history of 
some scientific word. For instance, there is a well known 
tree in Guiana which scientific people all over the world 
call Piratenera guianensis ; it is the tree from which our 
so-called " Letter Wood" is obtained. Piratenera is neither 
Latin nor Greek, belongs that is to say to neither of the two 
languages to which most scientific words may be traced. 
Pira or paira is the Carib name for the letter wood tree, 
the heart-wood of which, and the heart-wood only, has 
those letter-like markings which have given to it its colo- 
nial name. Paira timehri or Paira timineeri — that is, 
"marked paira" — is the Carib name for this particular 
heart-wood. Aublet, the botanist who found this tree in 
Guiana and named it, took its Carib name, paira timeehri, 
to make the scientific word piratenera, which looks exter- 
nally sufficiently like a Latin word to make etymologists 
ponder over its origin. 
So this word Timehri, the name of these old writings 
which are written on the rocks of Guiana, is the name 
which we have adopted for the writings which we propose 
to mark on the white paper of this Guiana journal. 
Lastly, we cannot but thank our contributors for their 
unexpectedly numerous and valuable contributions, so 
many in number that some have necessarily been reserved 
for future use ; and we are almost equally indebted to 
our publisher, who has so energetically entered on his 
share of the enterprize, that this, our first number, pro* 
