The expression of Herodotus about the Libyan wild asses, ἄποτοι, οὐ γὰρ δὴ πίνουσι, contrasts forcibly the two styles.—R. G.
[171] “Verborum translatio instituta est inopiæ causâ.”—De Orator. iii. 39.
[172] Dr. Whewell’s Philos. of the Inductive Sciences, ii. 460. Mill’s Logic, ii. ch. iv. p. 205.
[173] Take, for instance, the botanical description of the Hymenophyllum Wilsoni; “fronds rigid, pinnate, pinnæ recurved subunilateral, pinnatifid; the segments linear undivided, or bifid spinulososerrate.”—Philosophy of Ind. Sci. i. 165. This is the perfection of scientific terminology, but how would it answer the purposes of common life? And how would poetry be possible with such clumsy terms as these? At the same time, in Science, dry precision of nomenclature is better than poetical terms like the mediæval “flowers of sulphur.” Fancy would only mislead in terminology which requires accuracy; e.g. δίπους, the Greek name for jerboa might easily have led to mistakes.
[174] Sir Thos. Browne, Christian Morals, ii.
[175] Berkeley, Principles of Hum. Knowledge, xxxv.
[176] “It is remarked by a great metaphysician, that abstract ideas are, in one point of view, the highest and most philosophical of all our ideas, while in another they are the shallowest and most meagre. They have the advantage of clearness and definiteness; they enable us to conceive and, as it were, to span the infinity of things; they arrange, as it might be in the divisions of a glass, the many-coloured world of phenomena. And yet they are ‘mere’ abstractions, removed from sense, removed from experience, and detached from the mind in which they arose. Their perfection consists, as their very name implies, in their idealism; that is, in their negative nature.”—Jowett on Romans, &c., ii. 88.
[177] Ecclus. xlii. 23.
[178] Nodier, p. 58 sqq.
[179] Ἔοικεν ὁ τὴν Ἴριν Θαύμαντος ἔκγονον φήσας οὐ κακῶς γενεαλογεῖν.—Plato, Theæt. p. 155.