22 
MEMOIR OP WERNER. 
lar to that which Linnaeus had conferred on botany; 
but it was a service purchased at the same price. It 
cannot be denied, that this vocabulary has introduced 
into science more detail and precision ; that persons 
who accustom themselves to apply it, acquire a re- 
markable facility in distinguishing minerals at the 
first glance ; and that the attentive examination ne- 
cessary to draw up a description of these substances 
on the prescribed model, lias been the means of dis- 
criminating many which might otherwise have con- 
tinued to be long confounded in the crowd. But it 
must be confessed, at the same time, that this idiom, 
necessarily somewhat pedantic, and restricted in its 
modes of expression as well as in its words, has given 
an affected air to the works in which it has been too 
servilely employed, together with a dryness and pro- 
lixity more frequently fatiguing than useful. 
These inconveniences seem, however, to have 
been but little felt. Technical and half-barbarous 
terminologies had long been the reigning fashion. 
For thirty years the amiable science of botany spoke 
no other language, and naturalists, already accus- 
tomed to so many chains, experienced no apprehen- 
sion at the prospect of submitting to another. In- 
deed, we may suppose, that if any one was alarmed 
at this new creation, it was Werner himself, and 
that if he wrote so little after his first trial, it was 
partly that he might escape from the trammels that 
he had imposed on others. Happily his early work, 
adapted as it was to the taste of the nation, made 
