bed as _sun_categorematic, 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 Archaeology.
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 absoluteness 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 clear