MEMOIR OF WERNER. 27 



Werner, by admitting to the same privilege pro- 

 perties of a subordinate kind, embraces more easily 

 all sorts of minerals; but, in so doing, he overlooks 

 what is most profound and mysterious in their na- 

 ture; and when, in the conflict of the two methods, 

 he has opposed these subordinate qualities, not only 

 to analysis, but to crystallization itself, he has almost 

 always infringed that fundamental law, of which the 

 properties he believed himself entitled to employ are 

 only the corollaries. 



Werner had thus invented a language for de- 

 scribing minerals, as well as a method of arranging 

 them, and had assigned to each their distinctive cha- 

 racters ; in this manner constituting a mineralogy, 

 properly so called, or what he termed Oryctognosy^ 

 that is, a knowledge of fossils. 



The history of their arrangement on the globe, or 

 what he named Geognosy knowledge of the Earth 

 was the third point of view under which he re- 

 garded them. 



The Earth is composed of mineral masses ; and 

 modern observers have ascertained that these masses 

 are not distributed at random. Pallas, in his la- 

 borious journeys to the extremities of Asia, had re- 

 marked that their superposition was capable of be- 

 ing referred to fundamental laws ; and the same thing 

 was confirmed by the observations of De Saussure 

 and De Luc, while traversing, in numerous direc- 

 tions, the most elevated mountain-ranges in Europe. 

 Without quitting his small province, Werner ac- 



