Ill 



Death of Werner 135 



inner raiment. He tried to preserve both body and mind 

 in an equable frame. Among his little foibles was the 

 care he took never to expose himself to a draught. He 

 kept himself out of controversy, and eventually refrained 

 even from reading the journals, and from knowing what 

 was said in the outer world about himself and his opinions. 

 In this tranquil life he might perhaps have prolonged his 

 days, had not his feelings been deeply stirred by the mis- 

 fortunes which, during the Napoleonic wars, had befallen 

 Saxony, his adopted home. He took these trials so much 

 to heart that they led to a series of internal complications, 

 from which he died at Dresden, in the arms of his sister, 

 on 30th June 1817, in the sixty-eighth year of his age. 



With all his efforts after the placid life of a philosopher, 

 there was one subject that not unnaturally stirred Werner's 

 wrath the unwarranted publication, or at least circulation 

 of his lectures and theories. As he did not publish them 

 himself, and as there was a widespread desire to become ac- 

 quainted with them, MS. copies of notes of his lectures were 

 widely circulated, as a kind of mercantile speculation. 

 This was bad enough, but he heard of an intention to 

 print and publish them. So he took an opportunity of 

 cautioning the world that, while willing to shut his eyes 

 on the past, he could not tolerate any such conduct in 

 future, that he was himself engaged in revising his works 

 on the several branches of science he professed, and that 

 they would " forthwith appear one after another, enriched 

 by his latest observations and discoveries." 1 But the 

 revision was never made, and the publications never 

 appeared. 



1 New Theory of the Formation of Veins, 1791, preface. 



