INQUIRIES REGARDING CURRENT TENDENCIES IN 

 NEUROLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE. 



By C. L. and C. Judson Herrick. 



In the course of the preparation of the neurological arti- 

 cles for the proposed Baldwin Dictionary of Philosophy and 

 Psychology the vexed question of nomenclature was one of 

 the first to be encountered. The great diversity in the usage 

 of different authors, and, indeed, of the same authors at different 

 times in some cases, and, in particular, the recent rapid develop- 

 ment of entirely new lines of research involving the introduc- 

 tion of new terms, make it a matter of no small difficulty to 

 determine what is the actual current usage. The most direct 

 way to approach this fundamental matter seemed to us to be 

 that of the questionaire. We have, accordingly, framed a few 

 questions and circulated them among some of the leading neu- 

 rologists. It was not our purpose to draw up an exhaustive 

 list of debatable terms. Such lists have been published by the 

 German Nomenclature Commission {Archiv f. Anatomie und 

 Physiologie, 1895), by Dr. Wilder {[otir. of Comp. Neurology, 

 Dec, 1896) and by others. Our aim was, rather, to select 

 terms which would be representative of their kind and which 

 would reveal the tendencies of the current neuronymic move- 

 ment in this country and abroad. These circulars were mailed 

 to about 150 of the leading neurologists and anatomists of the 

 world, selected, so far as possible, impartially on the basis of 

 their eminence as investigators or teachers (62 American and 

 84 Foreign). Replies were received from about one third of 

 those addressed (27 American and 19 Foreign), and the an- 

 swers, though fewer in number than we had hoped, may, we 

 think, be regarded as fairly representative of the most eminent 

 neurological ability of the United States and Canada, England, 

 and Germany, with a few names from other countries. 



