48 Notices respecting New Books. 



which have been generally assigned to the literary forms in question, 

 there are probably but few instances in which they have been appro- 

 priately exercised. Among very early writers the treatise is in reality 

 a fragment of a dictionary ; the manual appears too soon ; and all 

 three are confounded in a spurious " system." In modern times, the 

 treatise partly maintains its true position and has partly degenerated 

 into the "paper" (which is a small contribution to knowledge); the 

 dictionary comprehends everything ; and the manual is an abstract 

 of the dictionary. It is indeed not an uncommon circumstance to 

 find the deductive method now excluded, as far as possible, from a 

 chemical manual ; while the author introduces in its place small 

 portions of physics, physiology, geometry, geology, or theology, 

 which much resemble, in their mutual disconnexion and worthless- 

 ness, the scraps of information which precede a diary. 



Considerations such as these cannot have escaped the learned and 

 distinguished editor, who is in great part author, of the chemical 

 dictionary now before us ; and if he has bestowed upon his labours 

 a collective name which we are disposed to think unsuitable, this 

 must be attributed rather to the faults and mistaken demands of the 

 times than to any misconception of a term. 



It will be evident to anyone who will take the trouble to make the 

 inquiry, that our English chemical dictionaries (to say nothing of 

 those published in foreign languages) have successively exceeded 

 their office to a continually increasing extent. Thus, in the preface 

 to Nicholson's dictionary (to which we more especially refer, inas- 

 much as it was the grandparent of the present work), it is laid down, 

 with much truth, that " when a subject does not, in itself, demand 

 much arrangement, or if the natural arrangement be such as not to 

 be apprehended but by those who have made considerable advances 

 in that department of knowledge, it is evident that the utility of a 

 dictionary to the Learner will more than compensate for the offence 

 given to the Masters of the Science. And accordingly it is found 

 that no systematical arrangement of mere words or terms, with their 

 explanations, can possess so much utility as that which follows the 

 order of the alphabet. When Macquer's Dictionary first appeared, 

 the author remarked that Chemistry was little more than a collection 

 of facts, scarcely entitled to the name of Science, or capable of either 

 synthetic or analytic explanation. Whence he drew a just conclusion 

 in favour of the Dictionary form." Nicholson proceeds to show that, 

 even at the time he writes (1795), the argument for this form is as 

 cogent as ever. Ure's dictionary (1821) was the immediate succes- 

 sor of Nicholson's. But it may be seen from the titlepage, and 

 still more from the contents of that work, that it was the intention 

 of the writer to diverge much from the plan adopted by his prede- 

 cessor ; and we are led, in somewhat fulsome phraseology, to expect 

 " the principles of the science investigated anew, and its applications 

 to the phenomena of nature, medicine, mineralogy, agriculture, and 

 manufactures detailed." We have also an ingenious novelty in this 

 book, in the shape of "an introductory dissertation containing in- 

 structions for converting the alphabetical arrangement into a syste- 



