170 REPORT— 1846. 
It may well be conceived with what a formidable load of names the me- 
mory must have been burthened, if any could have been found equal to it, 
had the anatomy of animals continued and made progress under its primitive 
condition of an assemblage of arbitrarily described and uncompared facts. 
Happily the natural tendency of the human mind to sort and generalize its 
ideas could not long permit such a state of the science, if science it could be 
called, to remain. A large and valuable portion of the labours of the com- 
parative anatomists who have honoured the present century, has been devoted 
to the determination of those bones in the lower animals which correspond 
with bones in the human skeleton; the results being usually expressed by 
applying to the parts so determined the same names, as far as the nomen- 
clature of anthropotomy allowed. Few, however, of the parts of the human 
body have received single substantive names; they are for the most part in- 
dicated by shorter or longer descriptive phrases, like the species and parts of 
plants before Linnzeus reformed botanical nomenclature. 
The temptation to devise a systematic Nomenclature of Anatomy, generally 
applicable to all animals, increases with the advance of the science, and from 
the analogy of what has taken place in other sciences it may one day be 
yielded to and exercise the ingenuity of some ardent reformer. But the same 
analogy, especially that afforded by chemical science since the time of Lavoi- 
sier, would rather lead the true friend of anatomy to deprecate the attempt 
to impose an entirely new nomenclature of parts, however closely expressive 
of the nature and results of the science at the period when it might be devised. 
For there is no stability in such descriptive or enunciative nomenclature ; it 
changes, and must change with the progress of the science, and thus becomes 
a heavy tax upon such progress. 
If the arbitrary term ‘ calomel,’ which, like ‘ house’ and ‘dog,’ signifies the 
thing in its totality, without forcing any particular quality of its subject 
prominently upon the mind, be preferable, on that account as well as its 
brevity, to the descriptive phrases ‘submuriate of mercury,’ ‘ chloride of 
mercury,’ or ‘ proto-chloride of mercury,’ in enunciating propositions respect- 
ing the substance to which it is applied ; and if it possesses the additional ad- 
vantage of fixity, of a steady meaning not liable to be affected, like a descrip- 
tive name or phrase, by every additional knowledge of the properties of the 
substance; the anatomist, zealous for the best interests of his science, will feel 
strongly the desirableness of retaining and securing for the subjects of his 
propositions similar single, arbitrary terms, especially if they are also capable 
of being inflected and used as noun adjectives. 
The practice of anatomists of the soundest judgement has usually been, 
to transfer the anthropotomical term or phrase to the answerable part when 
detected in other animals. The objection that the original descriptive or 
otherwise allusive meaning of the term seldom applies to the part with equal 
force in other animals, and sometimes not at all, is one of really little moment ; 
for the term borrowed from anthropotomy is soon understood in an arbitrary 
sense, and without regard to its applicability to the modified form which 
the namesake of the human bone commonly assumes to suit the ends required 
in the lower species. No anatomist, for example, troubles himself with the 
question of the amount of resemblance to a crow’s or other bird’s beak in the 
‘coracoid’ bone of a reptile, or with the want of likeness of the kangaroo’s 
‘coccyx’ to the beak of a cuckoo; or of the whale’s ‘vomer’ to a plough- 
share; or ever associates the idea of the original mystic allusion in the ana- 
tomical term ‘sacrum’ with his description of that bone in the megatherium 
or other monster. Common sense gratefully accepts such names when they 
become as arbitrary as cat or calomel, and when such concretes or adjectives 
as ‘coccygeal, ‘yomerine’ and ‘sacral’ can be employed to teach the pro- 
perties or accidents of their subjects. 
Gt <a 
