44 PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE UNIVERSE. 



portion of the Cosmos, than a mere dry enumeration of the 

 philosophical opinions prevailing in different ages, would 

 deserve to be called the history of philosophy. 



The confusion between the boundaries of closely allied 

 branches of study has been the greater, because for centu- 

 ries different portions of our empirical knowledge have been 

 designated by terms which are either too comprehensive, or 

 too restricted, for the notions they were intended to convey : 

 and which have besides the disadvantage of having borne a 

 very different sense in the languages of classical antiquity 

 from which they have been borrowed. The terms of physics, 

 physiology, natural history, geology, and geography, arose 

 and grew into general use long before clear ideas were enter- 

 tained of the diversity of the objects which those sciences 

 ought to embrace, and consequently of their respective 

 limits. Such is the influence of long habit upon language, 

 that in one of the nations of Europe most advanced in 

 civilisation, the word " physic" is applied to medicine ; and 

 in a Society of justly deserved and universal renown, writ- 

 ings on technical chemistry, geology, and astronomy experi- 

 pirically treated, (all branches of purely experimental science), 

 are classed under the general title of " Philosophical Transac- 

 tions." The attempt lias often been made, and almost always 

 in vain, to substitute new and more appropriate names for 

 those ancient terms, vague, it is true, but which, however, 

 are now generally understood. These changes have been 

 proposed, for the most part, by those who have occupied 

 themselves with the general classification of all branches of 

 human knowledge ; from the great Encyclopsedia (Margarita 

 Philosophica) of Gregory Eeisch( 19 ), Prior of the Chartreuse 

 of Ereiburg towards the end of the fifteenth century, to 



