22 



MEMOIR OF WERNER. 



Jar to that which Linnseus had conferred on botany; 

 but it was a service purchased at the same price. It 

 cannot be denied, that this vocabulary has introduced 

 into science more detail and precision ; that persons 

 who accustom themselves to apply it, acquire a re- 

 markable facility in distinguishing minerals at the 

 first glance ; and that the attentive examination ne- 

 cessary to draw up a description of these substances 

 on the prescribed model, has been the means of dis- 

 criminating many which might otherwise have con- 

 tinued to be long confounded in the crowd. But it 

 must be confessed, at the same time, that this idiom, 

 necessarily somewhat pedantic, and restricted in its 

 modes of expression as well as in its words, has given 

 an affected air to the works in which it has been too 

 servilely employed, together with a dryness and pro- 

 lixity more frequently fatiguing than useful. 



These inconveniences seem, however, to have 

 been but little felt. Technical and half-barbarous 

 terminologies had long been the reigning fashion. 

 For thirty years the amiable science of botany spoke 

 no other language, and naturalists, already accus- 

 tomed to so many chains, experienced no apprehen- 

 sion at the prospect of submitting to another. In- 

 deed, we may suppose, that if any one was alarmed 

 at this new creation, it was Werner himself, and 

 that if he wrote so little after his first trial, it waa 

 partly that he might escape from the trammels that 

 he had imposed on others. Happily his early work, 

 adapted as it was to the taste of the nation, made 



