innovation by the modern writer. Similarly, in the last elements of
mineralogy I took up, the first order of crystals was called 'tesseral';
the writer being much too fine to call them 'four-al,' and too much bent on
distinguishing himself from all previous writers to call them cubic.

10. What simple schoolchildren, and sensible schoolmasters, are to do in
this atmosphere of Egyptian marsh, which rains fools upon them like frogs,
I can no more with any hope or patience conceive;--but this finally I
repeat, concerning my own books, that they are written in honest English,
of good Johnsonian lineage, touched here and there with colour of a little
finer or Elizabethan quality: and that the things they tell you are
comprehensible by any moderately industrious and intelligent person; and
_accurate_, to a degree which the accepted methods of modern science
cannot, in my own particular fields, approach.

11. Of which accuracy, the reader may observe for immediate instance, my
extrication for him, from among the uvularias, of these five species of the
Butterwort; which, being all that need be distinctly named and remembered,
_do_ need to be first carefully distinguished, and then remembered in their
companionship. So alike are they, that Gerarde makes no distinction among
them; but masses them under the general type of the frequent English one,
described as the second kind of his promiscuous group of 'Sanicle,' "which
Clusius calleth Pinguicula; not before his time remembered, hath sundry
small thick leaves, fat and full of juice, being broad towards the root and
sharp towards the point, of a faint green colour, and bitter in taste; out
of the middest whereof sprouteth or shooteth up a naked slender stalke nine
inches long, every stalke bearing one flower and no more, sometimes white,
and sometimes of a bluish purple colour, fashioned like unto the common
Monkshoods" (he means Larkspurs) "called Consolida Regalis, having the like
spur or Lark's heel attached thereto." Then after describing a third kind