MEMOIR OP WERNER. 
37 
under a hundred others in the house of Werner 
To carry this matter to the extremity, he did not 
even reply to this Academy when it placed him on 
the list of its eight foreign associates, which is adorn- 
ed with all the great names of which Europe can 
boast for more than a century ; and perhaps he did 
not even know that this honour had been conferred 
on him, unless he happened to learn it from some 
almanack. 
But we may well pardon him, when we learn, 
that, about this same period, an express sent to him 
by his sister from Dresden, was obliged to wait two 
months at an inn, and at his expense, before a simple 
signature could he obtained to a paper relating to 
some urgent family business. 
This insurmountable antipathy to writing seemed 
the more unaccountable, as it caused him to infringe 
the laws of etiquette, which, next to his studies, was 
the subject that affected him most. In every thing 
else, he is said to have observed the slightest cour- 
tesies of social life with as much punctuality as he 
attended to the varieties of minerals. This spirit of 
formality, which was preserved in Germany for a 
longer time than any where else, and in Saxony 
longer than in any other part of Germany, was par- 
ticularly remarkable in him, apparently because it 
seemed in his eyes a kind of method. He delibe- 
rated about the arrangement of a dinner with as 
much gravity as about the arrangement of his library 
or cabinet. 
