206 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



secure time for preparation, for research, and for the instruction 

 of advanced pupils." 



As may be inferred from his character and from what has been 

 said on p. 205, Wyman preferred simple and vernacular terms. 

 During the years 1871-72 several of his letters contain frank ani- 

 madversions upon certain of my terminologic novelties. A discus- 

 sion of the subject would be out of place here. The following rep- 

 resentative extracts from a letter of October 23, 1872, should be 

 regarded in the light of two facts: First, his own studies of the brain 

 had been practically restricted to forms (frog and opossum) where 

 that organ is comparatively simple; secondly, it had not been then 

 proposed that the antagonistic preferences of the " classicists " 

 and the "vernacularists" might compromise in the employment 

 of paronyms, i. e., national slight modifications of the common 

 Latin antecedent; e. g., hippocampus, which becomes hippocampo 

 in Italian, hippocampe in French, hippocamp in English, and 

 Hippokamp in German. 



"I really do not think the time has come to establish a general 

 nomenclature, that is, one covering the whole ground, for the 

 reason that the subject is still in its infancy and not ready for it. 

 The muddle growing out of human anatomy will naturally disap- 

 pear in the course of time, as the horizontal method of viewing 

 animals must prevail. The term, Intermembral, strikes me as 

 good, although at first I relucted at it." * 



Notwithstanding Wyman's exceptionally mild disposition his 

 regard for verity was almost fierce, and upon occasion he could 

 rejoice in the tragedy implied in the phrase (from Huxley, I think), 

 "The slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." At 

 Wyman's hands, however, the sacrifice would be accomplished 



1 In this connection it is interesting and instructive to note that, in his 

 Memoir on the Development of the Ray, 1867, p. 35, Wyman consistently em- 

 ploys, if, indeed, he did not coin, the singularly appropriate term of Greek 

 derivation, protocercal, for the "primary, embryonic condition" of the tail; 

 this alone would warrant the use of the international proton rather than 

 "Anlage," the international and (to French anatomists, particularly) ob- 

 jectionable heteronym, 



