436 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



France, Spain, Portugal or Italy. The naturalists and lexicographers 

 of those countries failed even to appreciate its etymological aptness 

 and beauty. First, the French had to introduce a new word to cor- 

 respond — mammiferes or the breast-bearers. The other Latin races 

 followed; the Spanish and the Portuguese with mamiferos, and the 

 Italians with mammiferi. None of the words quoted in the Century 

 Dictionary are even given as nouns in the ordinary dictionaries of 

 those languages — not even in the great dictionary of Littre. Littre, 

 however, has the words mammalogie, mammalogique and mamma- 

 logiste. 



Of course the Germans coined a word from their vernacular — 

 Saugethiere or suckling animals: the cognate nations imitated; the 

 Dutch with Zoogdieren, the Swedish with Daggdjuren, and the Danes 

 and Norwegians with Pattedyrene. 



The first writer to use the English word Mammals to any extent 

 was Doctor John Mason Good. In 'The Book of Nature' (1826), in 

 the second lecture of the second series, 'On Zoological Systems,' he 

 specifically introduces it. Quadrupeds is not appropriate 'and hence 

 it has been correctly and elegantly exchanged by Linnaeus, for that of 

 Mammalia/ and he concludes, 'as we have no fair synonym for it in 

 our own tongue, I shall beg leave now, as I have on various other 

 occasions, to render mammals.' He repeatedly used the English form 

 elsewhere in 'The Book.' I have been unable to find any use of the 

 word in its singular number, however. 



The singular form — mammal — has been indicated as rare or 

 unusual. One might look through many volumes on mammals as 

 well as on general natural history and not find it. As a matter of 

 fact, however, it may be frequently used. Let us go, for example, 

 into a laboratory when they are assorting a miscellaneous lot of bones 

 gathered from some fossil ossuary. Such expressions may be heard 

 as 'that seems to be a mammal bone'; 'that is a mammal bone'; 'that 

 is a mammal bone'; 'that is a mammal bone' — or the substantive 

 mammal alone may be used. Further, a whale may be alluded to as 

 a gigantic mammal or a mammal giant. 



The earliest English author to use the singular form to any extent 

 was Eichard Owen. In his 'History of British Fossil Mammals and 

 Birds' (1846), for example, he alluded to a mastodon as 'this rare 

 British Fossil Mammal' (p. xxii), and asserted that he knew 'of no 

 other extinct genus of mammal which was so cosmopolitan as the 

 mastodon' (p. xlii) ; he said that 'the Myrmecobius is an insectivorous 

 mammal, and also marsupial' (p. 40), and he claimed, conditionally, 

 that 'the Meles taxus is the oldest known species of mammal now 

 living on the face of the earth' (p. 111). 



Even the word in plural form was grudgingly admitted. The Latin 



