THE STORY OF A WORD— MAMMAL. 437 



form mammalia was long preferred. The chief translators of the 

 'Eegne Animal' rendered mammiferes by mammalia; Blyth alone sub- 

 stituted mammalians in its place. Owen, in the work already cited 

 in which mammals was used on the title-page, employed mammalia 

 in the text more frequently than mammals, and yet he used the 

 English form more than any of his contemporaries. Popular as well 

 as scientific writers avoided the English word as one alien to the genius 

 of the language. Some preferred the word mammifers when they 

 would use an anglicized term. 



By reason of the general ignorance of the etymology of the word 

 mammalia, and the dislike of it, on account of the misapprehension 

 that it was an imperfect or clipped word, the early French natural- 

 ists devised one of their own — mammiferes — and this early took 

 root and has been universally adopted by French writers. It was to 

 some extent adopted by English writers of the first half of the century 

 under the form mammifers. Eobert Chambers, in his anonymous 

 'Vestiges of Creation/ frequently used it and Hugh Miller, in his 

 antidotes to the heresy of the Vestiges, sometimes did. Miller, in his 

 'Old Red Sandstone' (1841), also accepted the singular form in his 

 statement (Chapter IV.) that 'the mammifer takes precedence of 

 the bird, the bird of the reptile, the reptile of the fish.' The use of 

 the word, nevertheless, was never general. The derivative adjective, 

 however, was much more frequently adopted for a time. 



Lyell, in his 'Principles of Geology/ almost invariably used the 

 word mammalia, but accepted the adjective mammiferous instead of 

 mammalian and even of mammaliferous. (He admitted mammifers 

 in his 'Glossary/ but did not otherwise use it.) This, naturally, was 

 an example which others followed. It was not until the first half of 

 the century had been past for some time that the English word came 

 generally into use. 



The science which treats of mammals had to be named. Mammalogy 

 was naturally thought of, but many objected to it. The French, who 

 would not tolerate mammal or mammaux, although they had no objec- 

 tion to the analogous animal and animaux, on the whole took kindly 

 to mammalogie or mammologie. Substitutes, it is true, were offered; 

 Desmarest proposed mastologie and De Blainville mastozoologie and 

 the latter was admitted by Littre in his great dictionary, but they did 

 not secure a permanent foothold and mammalogie is the term now gen- 

 erally used. 



The objection to mammalogy was and is that it is a hybrid and 

 also a badly compounded and clipped word. It is formed of the 

 Latin mamma (a breast or teat) and the Greek J.6yoz; the true mean- 

 ing is a discourse on breasts rather than breast-bearing animals. Greek 

 nouns also generally have the vowel o rather than a before the second 



