542 THE NAME MAMMAL AND THE IDEA EXPRESSED. 



neeus, and in other places," and also iu the article on ''Quadruped," 

 the adjective "Diammalian." 



The .same Good, in The Book of Nature (1826) and in the second 

 lecture of the second series, ''On zoological systems/' again specif- 

 ically introduces it. Quadrupeds is not appropriate, "and hence it 

 has been correctly and elegantl}^ exchanged by Linnseus for that of 

 'mammalia,'" and he concludes, "As we have no fair synonym for it 

 in our own tong-ne, 1 shall beg leave now, as I have on various other 

 occasions, to render 'mammals.'" He repeatedly used the English 

 form elsewhere in The Book. I have been unable to lind any use of 

 the word in its singular number^ however. 



The singular form, '' mammal," has been indicated as rare or unusual. 

 One might look through many volumes on mammals, as well as on 

 general natural history, and not find it. As a matter of fact, however, 

 it may be frequently used. Let us go, for example, into a laboratory 

 when they are assorting a miscellaneous lot of Ijones gathered from 

 some fossil ossuary. Such expressions ma}^ be heard as "that seem^ 

 to 1)6 a mammal bone;" "that is a mammal bone;" "that is a m«;/?-- 

 mal bone;" ^Hhat is a mammal bone": — or the substantive "mammal" 

 alone may be used. Further, a whale may be alluded to as a gigantic 

 mammal or a mammal giant. 



The earliest English author to use the singular form, so far as 

 known, 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 mannnar'' (p. xxii), and asserted that he knew "of no 

 other extinct genus of mammal which was so cosmopolitan as the 

 mastodon" (p. xlii); he said that "the myrmecobius is an insecti- 

 vorous mammal, and also marsupial" (p. 40), and he claimed, condi- 

 tionally, that "the Meles taxus is the oldest known species of mannnal 

 now living on the face of the earth" (p. 111). Robert Chambers, in 

 editions of the famous Vestiges of Creation, published afterwai-ds, 

 also used the singular number in several cases (e. g.. Harper ed., 

 pp. 110, 280), although in earlier editions (1844 et seq.) he used 

 "mammifer'' (e. g., p. 103). So, likewise, did Hugh Miller in his 

 later works. In an extension of the statement respecting the succes- 

 sion of the vertebrate classes already referred to, mammal is used 

 instead of mammifer. In the chapter on "final causes" in The Foot- 

 prints of the Creator (1847) it is claimed that an increase in size of 

 the brain in comparison with the spinal cord is correlative with the 

 succession of the animals; after the brains of the fish, reptile, and 

 bird, "next in succession came the brain that averages as four to one — 

 it is that of the manmial." Elsewhere (Boston ed., p. 238) the singu- 

 lar is also used and the plural "mammals" often. 



"The volumes of the Pantologia are not paged, the alphabetical arrangement hav- 

 ing been thought to supersede pagination. 



