Bibliographical Notes

Dr. C. A. BACKER, Verklarend Woordcnboek van wetenschappelijke plantennamen (Explanatory dictionary of scientific plantnames) — Noordhoff-Kolff, Groningen-Batavia, 1936 — XII + 664 — Price: flh. 19.50. Many botanists and also sylvi-, liorti- and agriculturists and almost all taxonomists are, in the course of their daily task, meeting plant-names, the exact meaning, signification or derivation of which is not immediately clear to them. Being an intelligent and studious man, he often feels the desire to know more of a name than just its orthography and so he makes a grab at one of those books written to spread more knowledge about the matter. If it is the name of a genus or of a subgenus, WITTSTEIN’S „IIandwörterbuch” is the book he needs, although it yields no help for genera younger than 1852 (date of preface). If it is a specific name or a latin or latinized botanical term, BISCHOFF is his man, either by his „Handbuch der botanischen Terminologie” of 1833—1844 or by his smaller „Wörterbuch der beschreibenden Botanik”, of 1857 (2nd Ed.). In case these books cannot meet his wishes, on account of their age or merely out of deficiency, our present-day investigator will try to find the name in one of the more recent lists: BAILEY’S „Companion for the Queensland student of plant life” of 1893; SALOMON-SCHELLE, Worterbuch der botanischen Kunstsprache, 1904; KANNGIESSER, Etymologie der Phanerogamen-Nomenclatur, 1908 (mainly generic names); Voss, Botanisches Hilfs- und Wörterbuch (6th ed. 1922), etc.