Page:Scientific Memoirs, Vol. 1 (1837).djvu/202

 Second Section.

I. Preliminary Remarks.—In the first part of these researches, I examined the ancient texts in which the names of insects injurious to the vine occur, taking the authors in chronological order whenever this plan did not destroy the relations of etymology or derivation existing between the words the signification of which was to be determined. This method appeared to me the only one adapted to the attainment of the end which I proposed.

All languages vary, and, like the people by whom they are spoken, experience the effects of time, revolutions, and custom. Various contemporary writers employ the same words in different senses, either because they do not possess the same degree of knowledge of the things designated by them, or because they differ from each other with respect to the intention with which the terms in question are employed; one writer being required to limit his meaning to one simple, special, or rigorous sense, and another, on the contrary, having in view a figurative sense only, or a vague or general notion.

The examination of all the texts in which the same word is employed, has furnished us with the signification, more or less determinate, which each author attached to the word, and also with the different circumstances and particulars contained in each text relative to the insect named, which consequently may serve as means to distinguish it.

We have been careful to recapitulate the various significations which result from our critical examination of each word; to compare the imperfect notions of the ancients with the more precise knowledge of the moderns; it will therefore only be requisite to recall to our minds the result of each of these examinations, without being perplexed, in this last and difficult investigation, by philological discussions. Should we be forced to commence new inquiries of this nature, it will only be with regard to words which offer matter for curious or useful digressions, and not in relation to those which essentially belong to the subject of which we are treating.

But it will not here be requisite to follow the same order of discussion which we thought it necessary to adopt in our first section. We are not now endeavouring to determine the significations given by each author to a certain word, independently of its real sense, but to ascertain that real sense from the various significations that have been ascribed to the word, and the different applications which have been made of it. Things, not words, are now the subjects under