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474 NOLLE PROSEQUI NOMENCLATURE best of which is the "Venus combing her Hair." His best known work is the statue of William Pitt at Cambridge. He amassed a fortune of 200,000, and, being childless, be- queathed the greater part of it to his friends Francis Palmer and Francis Douce the anti- quary. His life has been written by Allan Cunningham in the " Lives of British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects," and by his pupil J. T. Smith (2 vols., London, 1828). NOLLE PROSEQUI (Lat., to be unwilling to prosecute), a law term derived, as most law terms are, from those ancient days when all law proceedings and records were in Latin. It meant that the plaintiff declared in court and entered upon the record that he would no longer prosecute his suit. In civil cases, this is superseded in modern times by a nonsuit ; but when a plaintiff enters a nonsuit, especially if he does this by order of court, he is still sometimes said to be "nol pros'd." Nolle prosequi is very common in criminal cases. It is entered by the officer who acts for the gov- ernment, when, from insufficiency of evidence or for other reasons, he is unwilling to press the trial any further. He may do this, generally, at any 'stage of the proceedings. But it puts the defendant, or accused party, to this disad- vantage : if he has a verdict in his favor, he cannot be tried again for that offence ; but if nolle prosequi is entered, he may be indicted and tried again at any time for the same of- fence. He would prefer therefore a verdict in his favor ; but this he ought not to have, if he would escape now by a merely accidental ab- sence of testimony. On the contrary, if it be obvious that he could be fairly tried now, and would probably be acquitted, it would not be just to permit the government to hold this power of accusation and trial over him indefi- nitely. In some of the states there are stat- utes, or rules of court, intended to meet this difficulty ; and practical mischief seldom arises from it, as a nolle prosequi would not be en- tered by government against the wishes of a defendant, without unquestionable reasons. NOMENCLATURE, Chemical, the vocabulary of terms used in chemistry. Being the instrument of thought upon chemical subjects, it has ne- cessarily at every period in the history of the science reflected the general intellectual char- acter of the time, as well as the stage of devel- opment which chemistry had attained. The crude notion of ancient writers that the heaven- ly bodies exercised an influence upon terrestrial affairs is expressed in the language of the peri- od by such names as Sol for gold, Luna for silver, Jupiter for tin, Mars for iron, Venus for copper, Saturn for lead; and. the progress of the study was greatly retarded by the confused terms then employed. In truth,' few events are recorded in the history of chemical science which have exerted a more beneficial influence upon its progress than the adoption of the ad- mirable method of nomenclature brought for- ward by Guyton de Morveau in 1782, modified by a committee of the French academy, of which Lavoisier was chairman, in 1787, and published under their auspices in a volume en- titled Methode de nomenclature chimique (Paris, 1787). Several chemists had previously per- ceived the importance of designating compound bodies by the names of their components, and had endeavored to improve upon the indefinite and irrational names adopted by the alchemists ; but no satisfactory general system had till then been devised. It should be mentioned at start- ing that the system of nomenclature here to be described is so intimately connected with cer- tain theoretical views of the constitution of compound bodies, that any treatise upon it must become also in a measure a description of the methods of classification upon which it depends. The main feature of the system con- sists in forming in a simple and uniform man- ner the name of any and every compound from the names of the substances of which it is com- posed. The elements alone are subject to no rule, their names depending entirely upon the choice of the discoverer. It is true that the framers of the nomenclature sought in several instances to express some one prominent prop- erty of the element by means of its name, as in the case of oxygen (Gr. 6fi>f, acid, and yewfaiv, to generate), which was thought to be " a prin- ciple necessary to acidity," and hydrogen (Gr. vdup, water, and -yewdeiv). But these attempts were confined to the elements which at that time had been recently discovered ; the com- mon names of all the well known metals, al- kalies, &c., having been retained. Of the ele- ments which have since been discovered, some have been named in allusion to striking pecu- liarities, as chlorine (xkupds, green), iodine (l&tiw, violet), &c. For the most part, how- ever, names devoid of any chemical significance have been chosen, the propriety of which course is now very generally admitted by chemists. In choosing the name of an element, it is im- portant only that it shall be well adapted to the formation of compound names. In accord- ance with Davy's suggestion, the names of the more recently discovered metals have received a common termination urn, as potassium, pla- tinum, &c. The idea of applying some one uniform termination to each of the members of a natural group had previously been sug- gested by Bergman, from whom it was adopted also by the French nomenclaturists, who pro- posed that the names of metals should all ter- minate in e, as platine, cuivre, &c. The names of another class of elements terminate in ine, as chlorine, iodine, &c. The elements are di- vided into two classes, metals and non-metallic bodies (metalloids). The metals all possess certain analogous characteristic properties. The class of metalloids, however, includes several quite distinct groups of elements. When two elements of unlike properties combine with each other, the product is termed a binary compound. Binary compounds are divided into three great classes, acids, bases, and indif-