2. Since the advantage of indigenous over learned terms, or the contrary, depends upon the balance of the capacity of inflexion and composition on the one hand, against a ready and clear significance on the other, it is evident that the employment of scientific terms of the one class or of the other may very properly be extremely different in different languages. The German possesses in a very eminent degree that power of composition and derivation, which in English can hardly be exercised at all, in a formal manner. Hence German scientific writers use native terms to a far greater extent than do our own authors. The descriptive terminology of botany, and even the systematic nomenclature of chemistry, are represented by the Germans by means of German roots and inflexions. Thus the description of _Potentilla anserina_, in English botanists, is that it has _Leaves interruptedly pinnate_, _serrate_, _silky_, _stem creeping_, _stalks axilllar_, _one-flowered_. Here we have words of Saxon and Latin origin mingled pretty equally. But the German description is entirely Teutonic. _Die Blume in Achsel_; _die Blätter unterbrochen gefiedert_, _die Blättchen scharf gesagt_, _die Stämme kriechend_, _die Bluthenstiele einblumig_. We could imitate this in our own language, by saying _brokenly-feathered_, _sharp-sawed_; by using _threed_ for _ternate_, as the Germans employ _gedreit_; by saying {321} _fingered-feathered_ for _digitato-pinnate_, and the like. But the habit which we have, in common as well as scientific language, of borrowing words from the Latin for new cases, would make such usages seem very harsh and pedantic.