various important subjects in Mineralogy. $98 
quite indifferent, since it has not yet become an object of the 
science ; and this name may be afterwards replaced by a sys- 
tematic denomination, which is the only change of names in 
which we should ever indulge ourselves. To abolish one trivial 
name, and to introduce another in its stead, does not forward 
the interest of the science, but merely gratifies personal vanity. 
As mineralogists are now daily employed in enlarging and per- 
fecting our actual knowledge in the science, such cases must be 
diminishing in frequency ; whereas the difficulties and confusion 
arising from them would increase, by the endeavours to suppress 
science and continue empiricism. 
The Terminology, the Theory of the system, and the Nomen- 
clature, the three departments of Natural History treated of 
above, form the constituents of theoretical Mineralogy ; prac- 
tice, or the application of it to nature, requires something more. 
What must we do, if we have an individual before us, in order 
to connect the single body in question, the properties of which 
we have ascertained, with the above-mentioned general ideas, 
since, though it be contained within them, it presents only a 
single particular case of the generality considered; and also to 
provide it with the right name P Or what can we do, to arrive 
at the knowledge of a mineral, the name of which we know, 
without having the object itself before our eyes ? The solution 
of both problems depends upon some contrivance of connecting 
the general idea with the name , or of connecting the name with 
the general idea , as produced by the actual examination of the 
natural productions. And this is more properly the object of 
Natural History, for which all that has preceded forms but the 
preparation, or, as it were, the apparatus. This idea of. Natural 
History exactly agrees with the definition of it given by Lin- 
nrnus, and even with the following passage by Werner. “ When 
I open a work on oryctognosy, it is with the intention either of 
obtaining a general knowledge of that science ; or of acquiring, 
in particular, the complete conception of a fossil, which I know 
only by name ; or of learning, in respect to a fossil which I have 
found, and whose external characters I have discovered, what is 
its name, and what place it occupies in the system of fossils 
Werner on the External Characters of Minerals, p. 3. 
