Apkil 21, 1899.] 



SCIENCE. 



579 



sumed to be sanctioned by the authoritative 

 journal in which it is printed. All of the 

 following English words occurring therein 

 differ from their Latin (or Latinized) ante- 

 cedents in the omission of the inflected 

 syllable: Form, system, barbarism, act) 

 public, defect, subject, natural, official, dis- 

 tinct, historic, artificial, peculiar, human. If 

 to these be added a few equally familiar, viz. , 

 «rm, aqueduct, oviduct, tract, exit and stomach, 

 it will be conceded, I trust, that hippocamp 

 is in irreproachable etymologic company. 



Indeed, we may now adopt the affirma- 

 tive attitude and declare that among all the 

 principles of language formation no one is 

 better established or more generally recog- 

 nized by scholars than that certain Latin 

 words may be Anglicized by the elision 

 of the ultima.* 



I gladly forbear further direct and specific 

 comment upon the case of hippocamp, but its 

 more general aspects may be indicated in 

 the three following queries : 



1. Does scientific comity (which is com- 

 parable in some respects with what is called 

 'senatorial courtesy') render it incumbent 

 upon the author of an article to refrain from 

 disavowing responsibility for unjust state- 

 ments wrongly attributed to him by a re- 

 viewer ? 



2. Should editorial regard for the privi- 

 leges of writers tolerate the publication of 

 unsound linguistic allegations that bring 

 discredit upon American scholarship ? 



3. Is it probable that further assaults 

 upon the simplified nomenclature from the 

 etymologic standpoint will redound to the 

 advancement of knowledge or the credit of 

 the assailants ? 



* This is simply one of several well-known ways 

 of converting Latin words into English ; others are 

 enumerated in ' Anatomical Terminology ' (Eeference 

 Handbook of the Medical Sciences, VIII., 527) ; for 

 all such processes of word-adoption the term pa- 

 ronymy (from n-apuvv/j.ia, the formation of one word 

 from another by inflection or slight change) was pro- 

 posed by me in 1885. 



XXV. Tliat, saving yerhaps in the case of 

 such German anatomists as read English with 

 difficulty, the amount and nature of the informa- 

 tion contained in the article numbered 5 in the 

 note to p. 566 over and above ivhat was already 

 accessible to them hi my oivn publications com- 

 pensates for the misapprehensions likely to be oc- 

 casioned by it. 



XXVI. That efforts toward the establishment 

 of an international nomenclature should be 

 abandoned because of the arrogance of individ- 

 uals or committees of particxdar nations. — As an 

 evidence of the existence of a real discour- 

 agement in this respect I quote from a re- 

 cent private letter from a well-known nat- 

 uralist : 



" I am not a believer in international cooperation, 

 since it generally means that one nation has it all its 

 own way." 



If we read between the lines and recall 

 the epigram, ' Man and woman are one, but 

 the man is the one,' it may be imagined 

 that my pessimistic correspondent adum- 

 brates the doctrine, * As to Anatomic No- 

 menclature all nations are one— but Ger- 

 many is the one.' 



XXVII. That, in estimating the probability 

 of the soundness and eventual adoption of my 

 terminologic proposals, there should be taken into 

 account only or^ even mainly the terms that are 

 new or otherwise less acceptable, rather than those 

 respecting which my adoption antedates that of 

 the Anatomische Gesellschaft. — Let us grant, 

 for the sake of argument, that my aula, 

 porta, cimbia, mesocoelia, metatela, metaporus 

 and the like are doomed to ' innocuous 

 desuetude ;' shall the folly of their vain in- 

 jtroduction outweigh the evidences of sane 

 prevision exhibited between the years of 

 1880 and 1895 in the deliberate and inde- 

 pendent choice, among abundant and per- 

 plexing synonyms, of, for example, the 

 following : Pallium, gyrus, Jissu7-a, insida, 

 centralis (rather than Molandi}, collateralis, 

 calcarina, paracentralis, praecuneus, cuneus, 

 hipjyoca^npus, fornix, thalamus, hypophysis, di- 



