108 On Meteorological Nomenclature. | : 
terms easy to be comprehended by all persons of moderate edu- 
cation, he had rummaged the old neglected Norman-French for 
a set of uncouth epithets which would have posed an antiquary ? 
Suppose that the still more illustrious Linnzus, instead of his most 
admirable, comprehensive, and comprehensiti/e terms, had pub- 
lished his Systema Nature, his Genera and Species Plantarum, 
with a scientific nomenelature extracted from the barbarous ra- 
dicals of the Swedish language, can it be for a moment thought 
that the study of nature, and consequent expansion of the hu- 
man mind, would have been so universal as it happily has been? 
In illustration, let us consider the languages of botany and 
mineralogy: a person possessing no more knowledge of the 
learned languages than is uecessary for the proper comprehending 
of our own, without being able to translate a single line of Virgil 
or Horace, may (from the universal adoption of the Linnean 
phraseology) in a very short time be able to take up the Flora 
of almost any country, and stroll with its author through paths 
of flowers ; now investigating the scanty herbage of the northern 
regions, and then revelling in the magnificent productions of 
New Holland or the Cape. Mincralogy on the contrary, whose 
connexion with chemistry, whose durable productions abounding 
with beauty, brilliancy, and the most correct geometry, would, 
under more favourable circumstances, have been studied with 
delight, is comparatively. neglected ; and may not the neglect 
be in a great measure attributed to the jargon with which it is 
incumbered? a jargon unintelligible to any but the Germans, 
from whom it sprung, and the few who have degraded themselves 
by their conversion into Germanised Englishmen! Had the state 
of chemical and mineralogical knowledge been the same in the 
time of Linnzeus as it is at present, he would most probably have 
occasioned the extensive cultivation of the latter, by bestowing 
on it a language brilliant and exact as its own native crystals ; 
whereas the student is now enveloped in a fog, dark and im- 
penetrable as the recesses from whence those erystals are de- 
rived, 
If Mr. Forster’s meteorological observations were intended 
for the information of his countrymen only, and were made known 
to them through a medium the circulation of which was con- 
fined to the limits of our own isle, there could be no objection 
to his conveying instruction in the terms he proposes ; but when 
it is recollected that your valuable Magazine most deservedly 
attracts the attention of those citizens of the scientific common- 
wealth who reside abroad*; I should hope that, on reconsidering 
, the 
* Mr. F. admits the propriety of Mr. Howard’s nomenclature in descrip- 
tions in Latin, or which are to go abroad; the latter is actually the ~ 
wit 
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