On the principle that there should be a name for every thing which we have frequent occasion to make assertions about, there ought evidently to be a name for every Kind; for as it is the very meaning of a Kind that the individuals composing it have an indefinite multitude of properties in common, it follows that, if not with our present knowledge, yet with that which we may hereafter acquire, the Kind is a subject to which there will have to be applied many predicates. The third component element of a philosophical language, therefore, is that there shall be a name for every Kind. In other words, there must not only be a terminology, but also a nomenclature.
The words Nomenclature and Terminology are employed by most authors almost indiscriminately; Dr. Whewell being, as far as I am aware, the first writer who has regularly assigned to the two words different meanings. The distinction, however, which he has drawn between them being real and important, his example is likely to be followed; and (as is apt to be the case when such innovations in language are felicitously made) a vague sense of the distinction is found to have influenced the employment of the terms in common practice, before the expediency had been pointed out of discriminating them philosophically. Every one would say that the reform effected by Lavoisier and Guyton-Morveau in the language of chemistry consisted in the introduction of a new nomenclature, not of a new terminology. Linear, lanceolate, oval, or oblong, serrated, dentate, or crenate leaves, are expressions forming part of the terminology of botany, while the names “Viola odorata,” and “Ulex Europæus,” belong to its nomenclature.
A nomenclature may be defined, the collection of the names of all the Kinds with which any branch of knowledge is conversant; or more properly, of all the lowest Kinds, or infirmæ species—those which may be subdivided indeed, but not into Kinds, and which generally accord with what in natural history are termed simply species. Science possesses two splendid examples of a systematic nomenclature; that of plants and animals, constructed by Linnæus and his successors, and that of chemistry, which we owe to the illustrious group of chemists who flourished in France toward the close of the eighteenth