172 



BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



personal element, and affords opportunity for reflection and 

 for consultation with disinterested experts. ^ 



Those who may entertain ^ a not unnatural impatience at the 

 apparently slow progress made in this country, and who may 

 even feel mortified when comparing the two score terms adopted 

 by the American Neurological Association with the forty-five 

 hundred recommended by the Anatomische Gesellschaft, may 

 well consider: 



First, the improbability that any competent American anat- 

 omist could have been diverted from his regular duties long 

 enough to accomplish what was so effectively done by the 

 secretary of the Anatomische Gesellschaft. 



Secondly, the enormous advantage afforded by the complete 

 list adopted by the Gesellschaft. Many dead or dying terms 

 have been disposed of, and the " decks have been cleared " for 

 more efficient action. 



TJiirdly, whatever precipitation, vacillation, and error may 

 be condoned in individuals whom volition or circumstances may 

 lead to assume untenable positions, organizations legislating in 

 the interest of posterity should advance so slowly as to risk 

 neither recession nor even deflection. The Germans them- 

 selves regard their comprehensive list, as a whole, as provi- 

 sional. The American selections (p. 131) constitute, we may 

 believe, an immortal forty. 



Were neural terms to be now devised de novo, the hippocamp 

 would certainly receive some less fantastic designation, and the 

 great cerebral commissure would be much more likely to be 

 called trabs (a beam) than corpus callosmn. But both callosum 

 and hippocampus are embalmed, as it were, in several other 

 names, and they are not sufficiently objectionable to warrant 

 their revolutionary annihilation. The best we can do is to 



1 Nearly all my letters and " slips " from anatomists and linguists in this and 

 other countries have been preserved. Always instructive and often encouraging, 

 the restraining and even destructive quality of some might have been endured 

 with less equanimity at a personal conference. 



2 That such sentiment, if entertained, has not been communicated to me either 

 directly or indirectly constitutes one of the many evidences of the tolerant and 

 helpful spirit that has animated American anatomists in dealing with the con- 

 fessedly perilous question as to how independent thinkers may best communicate 

 with their fellows. 



