The Revised Terminology in Cryptogamic Botany

Abstract

THE anglicized forms of most of the terms in common use, employed in the “Hand-book of Cryptogamic Botany” recently issued by Mr. G. Murray and myself, have not up to the present time found much support from our fellow-botanists. I propose, therefore, to give, in some detail, the reasons which have induced us to adopt them, and to urge their general use on writers on cryptogamic botany. For this purpose we will take as our text extracts from three reviews of the “Hand-book,” marked, as all the critiques have been, with only one or two exceptions, by a generous appreciation of the difficulties of our task, and a too great leniency to the many shortcomings of the work:—“The most conspicuous, though not the most important, of these ‘changes’ is the adoption of anglicized terminations for Latin and Greek technical words. This is a matter in which it is hard to draw the line aright.…As a matter of taste we think the authors have gone much too far in this direction. They complain of the ‘awkwardness and uncouth form of these words’; we should have thought the reproach applied much more strongly to ‘cœnobe,’ ‘sclerote,’ ‘nemathece,’ and ‘columel’” (NATURE). “An Englishman may guess what ‘archegone’ is short for, for example; but why puzzle a foreigner with a new form of a word with which he is familiar in every treatise hitherto written on the special subject in any European language?” (Academy). “Too sanguine expectations on this head might well be toned down by remembering the complete failure of the somewhat similar experiment made by Lindley.…Primworts, spurgeworts, bean-capers, and hippurids are decidedly simpler, even if less euphonious, than Primulaceæ, Euphorbiaceæ, Zygophyllaceæ, and Halorageæ; yet the longer Latin terms are still universally used, while the quasi-English ones have never obtained even temporary acceptance” (Journal of Botany)