Volume 1

A natural arrangement of British plants, according to their relations to each other as pointed out by Jussieu, De Candolle, Brown, &c. ... / With an introduction to botany ... By Samuel Frederick Gray.

  • Gray, Samuel Frederick, 1766-1828.
Date:
1821
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A natural arrangement of British plants, according to their relations to each other as pointed out by Jussieu, De Candolle, Brown, &c. ... / With an introduction to botany ... By Samuel Frederick Gray. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/900
    Bi PREFACE. ix plants: and there have not been wanting authors who have even written works upon gardening, or the materia medica, arranged on the Linnean system.* ‘This undue extension of the sexual method is contrary even to the declared opinion of Linneeus himself; who expressly says, he con- sidered it only as a temporary substitute until the natural method, or that which considers the mutual affinities of plants, be so far improved as to admit of a clue being ap- plied to it, by which the student may investigate the place of a plant in the method without any other help. * Thus the Linnean botanists committed the same error as the gram- marians and the philologers have frequently done in the composition of dictionaries, vocabularies, and etymologicons; from not considering the different uses of the various methods. Some interpreting dictionaries are arranged by roots, as those of Scapula, Mair, Salmon, and for most of the Oriental languages, to the great hindrance of the young students while, on the other hand, Gesner, Johnson, the Della Crusca, and‘the French Academy, have given us critical dictionaries, in the alphabetical order of the words, and have thus deprived themselves of the great belp they might have deduced from the method of the roots, or the vocabulary form, If these authors had reflected upon the subject, instead of blindly follow- ing the track of some preceding author, who had perhaps a different object in view, they would certainly have discovered that, for interpreting an unknown language into a known, the alphabetic order either of the initial or terminal letters was indeed the most proper, because the letters of the word are, by hypothesis, the only guide.” Whether the initial letters, as used in most cases, or the terminal, as adopted in the Coptic dictionaries, be the most proper, may admit of some dispute, the latter has the advantage of exhibiting the sense attached to the various terminations more clearly than the former. When the words of a known language are used to find the corresponding words in one that is unknown, the vocabulary form has the advantage of bringing together all those words that would denote nearly similar ideas. Whether this form, or the alphabetic order be adopted, this is the proper part of a double interpreting dictionary, to produce examples from the classic writers in the less known tongue, as authority for the use of those words; and not, as was absurdly done by Ainsworth, in the unknown—known part, since, in reading a foreign work, the context will enable the reader to choose the proper signification if the word be examples to guide us in our choice of nearly synonymous words. The utility of the method of roots, for a critical dictionary, and the difficulty of using one on this plan for interpretation, is surely self-evident.