Download PDF

PREFACE. IX
plants : and there have not been wanting authors who have
even written works upon gardening, or the materia medica,
arranged on the Linnasan system.* This undue extension
of the sexual method is contrary even to the declared
opinion of Linnseus 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 LinEEean botanists committed the same error as the gram-
marians and the philologers have frequently done in the composition of
diction.iries, 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 student} while,
on the other hand, Gesner, Johnson, the Delia 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 help 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 arc, 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 tiie 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 tlie 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
ambiguous; whereas, in writing a foreign language, we have occasion for
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.