294 The Microscope, 



While Flemming uses the following terms: 



1. Spirem. 



2. Aster. 



3. Metakinesis. 



4. Dyaster. 



5. Dispirem. 



I shall not pronounce upon the lucidity of these terms, but 

 will leave that to the reader's judgment; if he is unable to 

 come to a conclusion, I refer him to Prof. Charles Sedwick 

 Minot,of Boston, who writes thus in " Science," Aug. 6th, 1886 : 

 " During the division of cells, in the majority of cases, very re- 

 markable changes occur in the arrangement of the chromatine, 

 leading to the development of those striking appearances known 

 as karyokinetic figures, or, as Flemming would like to have 

 them called, mitosis. It is difficult to refrain from styling the 

 latter term, new-fangled ; for the systematic duplication of terms 

 with which Professor Flemming has unnecessarily burdened sci- 

 ence of late, can only be condemned. It is curious to encounter 

 such pedantry in so industrious and sensible a histologist, be- 

 cause to overvalue terminology is the mark of mental poverty." 



It is to be hoped that the progress of science will no longer be 

 hindered by a cumbersome technical language. Technical terms 

 have to be used sometimes, but an unnecessary accumulation of 

 such terms is positively injurious to the advance of real science. 

 Carnoy has been sharply criticised by Flemming for not using 

 technical terms in his memoirs on " Cytodieresis of Animals." 

 Carnoy uses language which is intelligible even to the ordinary 

 reader, it is certainly an injustice to the genius of any lan- 

 guage to introduce foreign words, when that language possesses 

 words adequate to express the author's meaning. The three 

 memoirs by Carnoy on Cell-Division will remain classical for a 

 long time. He is not content with studying this phenomenon of 

 cell life in one or in even a few cases, but he has explored the 

 whole branch of Arthropoda in his first memoir, and in the sec- 

 ond he treats of the cell-division of the egg of Ascaris megalo- 

 cephala, and in the third that of the egg of some nematode 

 worms. He has carefully guarded against basing his conclusions 

 upon one or on a few cases, but his observations have been made 

 upon all orders of insects ; Orthoptera, Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, 

 Pseudo-neuroptera, Diptera, Neuroptera, Hemiptera ; upon spi- 



