productions which might appear to have a more appropriate claim to it. No doubt, the ductile inflections and wonderful facilities for decomposition and reconstruction make Greek an excellent vehicle of scientific precision, and the use of a dead language saves your nomenclature from being confounded with your common talk. The use of a Greek derivative gives notice that you are scientific. If you speak of an acanthopterygian, it is plain that you are not discussing perch in reference to its roasting or boiling merits; and if you make an allusion to monomyarian malacology, it will not naturally be supposed to have reference to the cooking of oyster

sauce.

Like many other meritorious things, however, Greek nomenclature is much abused. The very reverence it is held in-the strong disinclination on the part of the public to question the accuracy of anything stated under the shadow of a Greek name, or to doubt the infallibility of the man who does it makes this kind of nomenclature the frequent protector of fallacies and quackeries. It is an instrument for silencing inquiry and handing over the judgment to implicit belief. Get the passive student once into palæozoology, and he takes your other hard names-your ichthyodorulite, trogontherium, lepidodendron, and bothrodendron - for granted, contemplating them, indeed, with a kind of religious awe or devotional reverence. If it be a

question whether a term is categorematic, or is of a quite opposite description, and ought to be described as suncategorematic, one may take up a very absolute positive position without finding many people prepared to assail it.

Antiquarianism, which used to be an easy-going slipshod sort of pursuit, has sought this all-powerful protection, and called itself Archæology. An obliterated manuscript written over again is called a palimpsest, and the man who can restore and read it a paleographist. The great erect stone on the moor, which has hitherto defied all learning to find the faintest trace of the age in which it was erected, its purpose, or the people who placed it there, seems as it were to be rescued from the heathen darkness in which it has dwelt, and to be admitted within the community of scientific truth, by being christened a monolith. If it be large and shapeless, it may take rank as an amorphous megalith; and it is on record that the owner of some muirland acres, finding them described in a learned work as "richly megalithic," became suddenly excited by hopes which were quickly extinguished when the import of the term was fully explained to him. Should there be any remains of sculpture on such a stone, it becomes a lithoglyph or a hieroglyph; and if the nature and end of this sculpture be quite incomprehensible to the adepts, they may term it a cryptoglyph, and thus dignify, by a sort of title of honour, the abso

luteness of their ignorance. It were a pity if any more ingenious man should afterwards find a key to the mystery, and destroy the significance of the established nomenclature.

The vendors of quack medicines and cosmetics are aware of the power of Greek nomenclature, and apparently subsidise scholars of some kind or other to supply them with the article. A sort of shaving soap used frequently to be advertised under a title which was as complexly adjusted a piece of mosaic work as the geologists or the conchologists ever turned out. But perhaps the confidence in the protective power of Greek designations lately reached its climax, in an attempt to save thieves from punishment by calling them kleptomaniacs.

It is possible that, were I to attempt to dignify the class of men to whom the following sketches are devoted by an appropriate scientific title, a difficulty would start up at the very beginning. As the reader will perhaps see, from the tenor of my discourse, I would find it difficult to say whether I should give them a good name or a bad-to speak more scientifically, and of course more clearly, whether I should characterise them by a predicate eulogistic, or a predicate dyslogistic. On the whole, I am content with my first idea, and continue to stick to the title of "The Book-Hunter," with all the more assurance that it has been tolerated, and

even liked, by readers of the kind I am most ambitious of pleasing.1

Few wiser things have ever been said than that remark of Byron's, that "man is an unfortunate fellow, and ever will be." Perhaps the originality of the fundamental idea it expresses may be questioned, on the ground that the same warning has been enounced in far more solemn language, and from a far more august authority. But there is originality in the vulgar everyday - world way of

1 To afford the reader, however, an opportunity of noting at a glance the appropriate learned terms applicable to the different sets of persons who meddle with books, I subjoin the following definitions, as rendered in D'Israeli's Curiosities, from the Chasse aux Bibliographes et aux Antiquaires mal avisés of Jean Joseph Rive :-"A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in title-pages and colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses whence issued; and all the minutiae of a book."-"A bibliographe is a describer of books and other literary arrangements.' "A bibliomane is an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders faster than he buys, cock-brained and purse-heavy."—" A bibliophile, the lover of books, is the only one in the class who appears to read them for his own pleasure.”—“A bibliotaphe buries his books, by keeping them under lock, or framing them in glass-cases.”

The accurate Peignot, after accepting of this classification with high admiration of its simplicity and exhaustiveness, is seized in his supplementary volume with a misgiving in the matter of the bibliotaphe, explaining that it ought to be translated as a grave of books, and that the proper technical expression for the performer referred to by Rive, is bibliothapt. He adds to the nomenclature bibliolyte, as a destroyer of books; bibliologue, one who discourses about books; bibliotacte, a classifier of books; and bibliopée, "l'art d'écrire ou de composer des livres," or, as the unlearned would say, the function of an author. Of the dignity with which this writer can invest the objects of his nomenclature, take the following specimen from his description of the bibliographe :

putting the idea, and this makes it suit the present purpose, in which, a human frailty having to be dealt with, there is no intention to be either devout or philosophical about it, but to treat it in a thoroughly worldly and practical tone, and in this temper to judge of its place among the defects and ills to which flesh is heir. It were better, perhaps, if we human creatures sometimes did this, and discussed our common frailties as each himself partaking of them, than that we should mount, as we are so apt to do, into the clouds of theology or of ethics,

"Nothing is rarer than to deserve the title of bibliographe, and nothing more difficult and laborious than to attain a just title to it. "Bibliography being the most universal and extensive of all sciences, it would appear that all subjects should come under the consideration of the bibliographe; languages, logic, criticism, philosophy, eloquence, mathematics, geography, chronology, history, are no strangers to him; the history of printing and of celebrated printers is familiar to him, as well as all the operations of the typographic art. He is continually occupied with the works of the ancients and the moderns; he makes it his business to know books useful, rare, and curious, not only by their titles and form, but by their contents; he spends his life in analysing, classifying, and describing them. He seeks out those which are recommended by talented authors; he runs through libraries and cabinets to increase the sum of his knowledge; he studies authors who have treated of the science of books, he points out their errors; he chooses from among new productions those which bear the stamp of genius, and which will live in men's memories; he ransacks periodicals to keep himself well up to the discoveries of his age, and compare them with those of ages past; he is greedy of all works which treat of libraries, particularly catalogues, when they are well constructed and well arranged, and their price adds to their value. Such is the genuine Bibliographe." This reminds one of the old Roman jurists, who briefly defined their own science as the knowledge of things human and divine.