SOME NEURAL TERMS. 119 



lar attention, have received vernacular names or heteronyms 

 which are brief and generally understood. Such are head, 

 hand, foot, heart, and brain. Indeed, the use of the Latin 

 equivalent for either of these would impress most persons as 

 pedantic. But this concession of, for example, the sufficiency 

 of brain instead of encephalon does not warrant the retention or 

 formation of an indefinite number of inflectives, derivatives, and 

 compounds from the heteronym. The same remark applies to 

 other languages. 1 



The following summary of the changes of my views during 

 a quarter of a century shows, I trust, a general advance in the 

 comprehension of the subject, and justifies me in commenting 

 upon the labors of others. 



I. 1871-79. In an effort to confirm, extend, and modify 

 certain morphologic ideas of my teacher, Jeffries Wyman, I 

 enumerated ('71, 172) the following requirements of technical 

 terms: (i) Classic Derivation. (2) Capacity for Inflection. 

 (3) Brevity. (4) Independence of Context for Signification. 

 (5) Non-ambiguity to the Ear as well as to the Eye. (6) Pre- 

 vious Use in a Kindred Sense. 



Then, as now, the most desirable (yet not absolutely essen- 

 tial) attributes of technical terms seemed to me (i) Classic 

 Derivation, (2) Capacity for Inflection. But both these had 

 been adumbrated long before by Barclay ('03) and Whewell 

 ('40), and distinctly enunciated by Owen ('46, 171) in the 

 immortal paragraph wherein myelon was proposed : 



" The fore part of the neural axis ... is called the brain or 

 encephalon; the rest I term myelon (Greek /xfeXo'?, marrow). 

 As an apology for proposing a name capable of being inflected 

 adjectively, for a most important part [see W. & G. ('89), 48] 

 of the body which has hitherto received none, I may observe 

 that, so long as the brief definitions ' marrow of the spine,' 

 ' chord of the spine,' are substituted for a proper name, all pro- 

 positions respecting it must continue to be periphrastic, e.g., 



1 Of the two German vernacles for encephalon, Gehirn is more commonly used 

 alone and Him in composition. On my list there are 35 compounds of Gehirn 

 and 1 06 of Him ; moreover, of the former, one-half are duplicated among the latter. 



