Apkil 21, 1899.] 



SCIENCE. 



575 



George M. Gould, the brothers Herrick, G. 

 S. Huntington, C. K. Mills, W. J. Herd- 

 man, H. F. Osborn, C. E. Riggs, D. K. 

 Shute, Soreuson, Spitzka, O. S. Strong, W. 

 G. Tight, C. H. Turner, A. F. Witmer and 

 R. Ramsay Wright ; also past or present 

 pupils or colleagues, T. E. Clark, P. A. Fish, 

 S. H. Gage, Mrs. Gage, G. S. Hopkins, O. D. 

 Humphrey, A. T. Kerr, B. F. Kingsbury, 

 W. C. Krauss, T. B. Stowell and B. B. 

 Stroud. I have now, I think, eliminated 

 all whose more or less complete adoption or 

 approval of my ' system' might be ascribed 

 in some degree to personal considerations. * 

 There has lately been afforded me, how- 

 ever, the desired opportunity of collating 

 the impressions of a somewhat homogeneous 

 group of scholars, quite unlikely to have 

 been influenced by a disinclination to antag- 

 onize my views. Through the courtesy of 



*Curiously enough, in the single instance of the 

 apparent operation of personal influence, the indi- 

 •vidual was of German descent and we had met 

 but once. Prior to our meeting in December, 

 1895, I prepared a typewritten list of the neural 

 terms that had been adopted earlier in the year 

 by the Anatomische Gesellschaft, and in parallel 

 columns added those preferred by me. Copies of 

 this list were sent to members of the Association a^ 

 a basis for the anticipated discussion. In January 

 the late Dr. Carl Heitzmann, in acknowledging his 

 copy, accounted at the same time for his absence from 

 the meeting : "My intention was to urge the ac- 

 ceptance of the nomenclature adopted by the German 

 Anatomical Society, deficient as it is, simply to ob- 

 tain uniformity. * * * Personally I cannot vote 

 against you ; hence I rather abstain from coming to 

 the meetings till this matter will be settled." 



My response was as follows: "Your letter affects 

 me deeply, and weremy efforts toward the improve- 

 ment of anatomical nomenclature for my own sake or 

 for the present at all it would go far to deter me from 

 further persistence. But I never lose sight of the fact 

 that we of to-day, and even the honored workers of 

 the past, are few and insignificant as compared with 

 our successors, and I do not mean to be reproached by 

 them for failing to do what I can. Do not refrain 

 from writing, publishing or voting against me accord- 

 ing to your convictions. It will come out right in 

 the end." 



the author of a recent American text- book 

 on ' The Nervous System and its Diseases,' 

 in which the simplified nomenclature is 

 fully and expressly employed, I have been 

 enabled to read all the reviews of it that 

 have thus far appeared. For the sake of 

 homogeneity I have excluded two non-med- 

 ical journals, the Revue Neurologique, which 

 says nothing on the subject of nomencla- 

 ture, and the Journal of Comparative Neurol- 

 ogy, which, upon the whole, is favorable. 

 This leaves thirty reviews of a book in- 

 tended for students; reviews written by 

 practitioners, some of them well-known ex- 

 perts and also teachers of neurology. As 

 such, upon general principles, any modifica- 

 tion of the current terminology must be more 

 or less unwelcome to them. 



Upon the basis of their attitude toward 

 the simplified nomenclature the reviews fall 

 naturally into four groups, viz. : A, those 

 that ignore the subject (8, about 27 per 

 cent.) ; B, those that merely mention it (6, 

 20 per cent.) ; C, those that condemn the 

 introduction of the simplified terms more or 

 less decidedly (6, 20 per cent.) ; D, those 

 that commend it (10, 33 per cent.). With- 

 out going so far as to reverse the Scriptural 

 saying and claim that ' he who is not against 

 us is with us,' we may infer that the four- 

 teen reviewers in groups A and B were at 

 least not ' repelled ' by the simplified terms; 

 on the contrary, many of them call atten- 

 tion to the clearness and accuracy of the 

 anatomic and embryologic sections of the 

 book where, of course, the terms are most 

 conspicuous. 



In category C I have included one that 

 might, without real unfairness, have been 

 left in category B ; in the Colorado Medical 

 Journal, after characterizing the anatomic 

 portion of the work as ' especially excellent,' 

 Dr. Eskridge simply expresses the ' fear 

 that the new nomenclature will not meet 

 with general favor.' 



The six antagonistic reviews are con- 



