818 EDITORIAL 
and ‘‘anticline” for those that outcrop convergently ? The terms do 
not even become intelligible when the reader is told that they are 
“from: the Greek. 3, Meamin Gn auen enc ems tal eatnmean Gl 
constantly remember that there is a suppressed ‘‘downward” to be 
read after each of these terms. The “downward” is consistently 
suppressed, for itis just as plebeian as sag or arch, or any of the vulgar 
English equivalents which might have been used to tell the whole 
story in the first place. But the folly does not all lie in the vanities 
of classical erudition. It is just as bad to make “heave” mean a 
horizontal movement as to make ‘“‘syncline” mean bent beds that 
diverge as they outcrop. The literature of science is full of phrases 
wrested from their current meanings and forced into special senses, 
which special and forced senses must always be remembered, if the 
reader would know what is meant. “Viscous” was a good word 
before it was criminalized. Starting with a liquid like molasses, we 
could once say that, as it was boiled, it became more and more viscous 
up to a maximum viscosity, beyond which, either by further boiling 
or by cooling, it became less viscous and more solid until it came to 
be distinctively rigid and brittle, a state which common people never 
thought of calling viscous. So, on the other hand, starting with glass, 
a very brittle solid, we could say that on heating it became gradually 
more and more viscous up to a maximum viscosity, beyond which 
it became more and more liquid and less and less viscous. Viscous 
then meant a certain peculiar intermediate state between the liquid 
and the solid, with a maximum viscosity midway, a phenomenon so 
common and distinctive as to need an appropriate term. Now, how- 
ever, by a misguided technicalization the term is scarcely less than 
Mephistophelian in its competency to beguile the unwary. 
But it was not this phase of the subject, we surmise, that the asso- 
ciation had in mind. Its members are probably ready to accept the 
sins of the past, if they may avoid the afflictions of the future. They 
probably had in mind the “pernicious activity” displayed in certain 
quarters in putting new names in the place of old ones, sometimes 
better, often worse, under pretext of correlation, etc., without a 
sufficient basis for so doing either in the thorough study of the forma- 
tions, or of the merits of the names, or of the principles involved, and 
without due regard to the economies of the profession or the conven- 
