1825.] of Claude-Louis Berthollet. 13 



combine them into a simple and well-digested Avhole. This 

 undertaking was made practicable after these discoveries of 

 Berthollet and Cavendish, and the mode in which Lavoisier and 

 Berthollet performed it ranks them among the first philosophers 



of the age. 



As Berthollet was by this time confessedly one of the very 

 first chemists of France, he almost necessarily became one of 

 those who now undertook to introduce an important reform into 

 the language of that science of which they had completely 

 changed th'e system, Lavoisier, Berthollet, Fourcroy, and 

 Guyton de Morveau, combined to plan and organise a new phi- 

 losophical chemical nomenclature. Such an undertaking had 

 long been a great desideratum, of which every day's experience 

 made the necessity more pressing and imperious. After the 

 important discoveries which had been made, and the many new 

 views which had been introduced into the science, it became a 

 matter of very great dirticulty to describe the one or to explain 

 the other in a language which had a constant reference to the 

 phlogistic system. For Lavoisier and his confederates, this was 

 wholly impossible, since the basis of the new system rested on 

 the subversion of the old. They accordingly set about a radical 

 reform where no palliative measures could be available, and if, 

 after all the changes they effected, and all the improvements 

 they introduced, by their" " Methodical Nomenclature," there 

 should still be discovered not a few omissions and anomalies, 

 any feeling of regret that they did not do more should be 

 absorbed in the gratitude that is justly due to them for having 



done so much. 



Indeed it would be difficult to point out how even men so 

 gifted as they were could have employed their talents in a man- 

 ner more beneficial to science, than In the construction of this 

 new lan^-uage. The imagination can hardly conceive a more 

 barbarous, repulsive, unmeaning chaos, than the chemical 

 nomenclature had for more than a century presented. It was 

 founded by Stahl in 1720, and it is easy to suppose how little 

 the first attempt at methodising chemical facts, made in the^ 

 very infancy of the science, would suit the rapid progress of 

 discovery which characterised the 18th century. It retained 

 not a few of the unintelligible terms of the alchemist, and more- 

 over was adapted to the system of Phlogiston, so as to be wholly 

 void of meaning when deta<;hed from it. Thus the access to 

 knowledge was rendered unnecessarily thorny and difficult, 

 while the initiated found the science itself proportionally less 

 advanced. Nothing could be more wildly arbitrary thnn tlie 

 names then affixed to the various chemical bodies, forming a 

 jargon in which men and gods, beasts, fish, and fowl, and things 

 of the inanimate creation, all found a namesake which the inven- 



