A LIST OF THE GENERA AND FAMILIES OF MAMMALS. 48 
and there was no name for the new class (or concept) as there was for all the others. 
A name, therefore, had to be devised. It was another happy inspiration that led 
Linnzus to name the class mammalia. . . . 
The name in question was evidently made in analogy with animalia. In animalia 
the principal component was anima, the ‘vital principle’ or animal liie. . . . The 
singular of the word was animal. In mammalia, the essential component is mamma, 
breast; the singular should be mammal. . . . In fine, a mammal isa being espe- 
cially marked by, or notable for having, mammxe. 
Not only had the name nothing to do with the alleged derivative Latin words, it 
was not admitted at all into the vernacular speech of France, Spain, Portugal or 
Italy. The naturalists and lexicographers of those countries failed even to appre- 
ciate its etymological aptness and beauty. First, the French had to introduce a new 
word to correspond—mamnmiféres, or the breast bearers. The other Latin races fol- 
lowed; the Spanish and the Portuguese with mamiferos, and the Italians with 
mammiferi. None of the words quoted in the Century Dictionary are even given 
as nouns in the ordinary dictionaries of those languages—not even in the great dic- 
tionary of Littré. Littré, however, has the words mammalogie, mammalogique and 
mammalogiste. 
Of course the Germans coined a word from their vernacular—Süugethiere, or 
suckling animals: the cognate nations imitated; the Dutch with Zoogdieren, the 
Swedish with Diggdjuren, and the Danes and Norwegians with Pattedyrene. 
The first writer to use the English word ‘mammals’ to any extent was Dr. John 
Mason Good. In ‘The Book of Nature’ (1826), in the second lecture of the second 
series, ‘On Zoological Systems,’ he specifically introduces it. Quadrupeds is not 
appropriate ‘and hence it has been correctly and elegantly exchanged by Linnzeus 
for that of Mammalia,’ and he concludes, ‘as we have no fair synonym for it in our 
own tongue, I shall beg leave now, as I have on various other occasions, to render 
mammals.’ 
The earliest English author to use the singular form to any extent was Richard 
Owen. In his ‘History of British Fossil Mammals and Birds’ (1846), for example, 
he alluded to a mastodon as ‘this rare British Fossil Mammal’ (p. xxii), and he 
asserted that he knew ‘of no other extinct genus of mammal which was so cosmo- 
politan as the mastodon’ (p. xlii); he said that ‘the Myrmecobius is an insectivorous 
mammal, and also marsupial’ (p. 40), and he claimed, conditionally, that ‘the Meles 
taxus is the oldest known species of mammal now living on the face of the earth’ 
(pail): 
SOURCES OF NAMES. 
The great majority of generic names of mammals have been derived 
from the Greek, a few from the Latin, some from modern languages, 
and a considerable number from native or barbarous names. ‘The 
proportion may, perhaps, be roughly estimated as follows: Greek, 70 
percent; Latin, 5 percent; modern languages (exclusive of barbarous 
names), 2 percent; native names, 23 percent. 
CLASSICAL NAMES. 
Apparently every name of an animal used in classical Greek has 
been made to do service in modern nomenclature, and these have been 
modified until they form a large number of the designations in common 
use. The following list, while by no means complete, contains about 
75 of the Greek names of mammals most commonly used: 

«The assertion of Owen that Aristotle fully recognized the class of mammals 
under the name Zootoca 1s without proper foundation. Long ago, in the American 
Naturalist ( VII, 458), I showed that different passages in Aristotle's books negatived 
such a statement, and that the word zootoka was not used as a substantive. 
