Mat 11, 1883.] 



SCIENCE. 



399 



on professional studj- without an^' thorough 

 preliminarj' training. The bodies of horses 

 or oxen are large and eostl}' for elementarj' 

 work, and, owing chiefly to defective legisla- 

 tion, in man_y states anatomical material is apt 

 to be scarce in medical schools. Hence, for 

 many years, good directions for the anatomical 

 study of some easilj' obtainable mammal of 

 convenient size have been a desideratum. 

 The lad who has properly dissected a cat 

 knows already' a good deal of human or equine 

 anatomy. He has not to learn, in his so often 

 disgracefully brief medical course, how to use 

 his scalpel ; he knows what a humerus and a 

 cerebral hemisphere are ; iliac artery and 

 median nerve are not strange and unmeaning- 

 names to him. In consequence, he can from 

 the first profitably confine himself mainly to 

 those special points in human, equine, of 

 bovine anatomj', which have direct bearing on 

 the future practice of his profession. 



For those who intend to studj' comparative 

 anatomy-, or who have a 3'ear or two to devote 

 to preparatorj- scientific studies before entering 

 a medical school, we cannot agree with the 

 authors that the cat is a good animal to begin 

 with. By those students who desire some sci- 

 entific anatomical knowledge, and have time 

 and opportunitj' to acquire it, so high a tj'pe 

 as the mammalian ought only to be taken up 

 after thorough study of several lower and sim- 

 pler forms. It is in connection with this fact 

 that we think it unfortunate that the authors 

 have made such unsparing use of new names. 

 To the scientific student a simple and uniform 

 terminology, applicable to all vertebrates with- 

 out confusion, is worth the trouble of learning. 

 But the great majoritj' of those who will find 

 this book useful will be lads desiring to ac- 

 quire some knowledge of anatomical technique 

 and phraseologj- as an aid to future profession- 

 al, specialized, non-scientific study of the body 

 of man or of certain domestic animals. It 

 would surely be better for this purpose that 

 (to take an example) students should learn to 

 know, read, and speak of the cavities in the 

 encephalon as the ventricles of the brain, the 

 name under which they will find them in their 

 professional text-books, rather than be taught 

 to call them procoelia, diacoelia, epicoelia, and 

 so forth. So far as the employment in the 

 laboratory of the book itself is concerned, we 

 must add, however, that the nomenclature 

 and terminology employed have proved much 

 smaller obstacles to its usefulness than we ex- 

 pected. When we first got hold of it, and 

 read such directions as • dorsiduct the, tail,' 

 and such statements as ' the cranium is the 



caudal part of the skull,' we feared that the 

 class on whom we proposed to trj' it would 

 have a bad time. The men did grumble a 

 little at first, but very quickly got to interpret 

 easil.y all the new adjectives used in the text, 

 and even to like them as facilitating brevitj- of 

 description. This experimental evidence of 

 the value of the nomenclature adopted may 

 outweigh the apparent disadvantage of teach- 

 ing students to call things ly names which. they 

 will rarely if ever afterwards hear applied to 

 them. 



The first eightj'-six pages of the book are 

 occupied with introduetorj' remarks on anatom- 

 ical technology, and things in general. Many 

 of them will be of great value to students who 

 have to work without the supervision of a 

 teacher ; and also make the book a good one 

 to put in the hands of a laboratory servant. It 

 is verj' convenient to have directions for pre- 

 paring injections and preservative liquids, for 

 keeping the animals in good health, for an- 

 aesthetizing or killing them, and for clean- 

 ing and sharpening instruments, collected and 

 printed as we here find them. There is, how- 

 ever, in these useful introductory pages, a 

 considerable amount of superfluous matter. 

 It maj' be necessary, though we doubt it, to 

 inform the reader what is a fair price for a 

 good scalpel or from what firms in the United 

 States he may buy a suitable pair of scales ; 

 but an account of the metric S3fstem and metric 

 bureau, and of good methods of exciting inter- 

 est in metric measurements, is out of place in 

 a dissector's handbook : a table of comparison 

 of the ordinary and the metric weights and 

 measures is quite enough. A discussion of 

 the rules of simple arithmetic would have been 

 as suitable, as an appendix to the formulae for 

 interconverting the Centigrade and Fahrenheit 

 thermometric scales, as is the account given 

 of the metric sj-stem. Similarl3-, most of the 

 ' Rules and aphorisms of general application ' 

 are about as much in place in an anatomical 

 text-book as would be the sermon on the 

 mount : they are admirable of their kind, but 

 one is puzzled to know what they are doing 

 in this gallerj'. 



The book, however, is, in spite of some 

 oddities, an honest piece of work, and will 

 have permanent value : it is a real contribu- 

 tion to our knowledge of cat anatom3\ Though 

 many of its novelties in nomenclature are we 

 believe unnecessary', and subjects are dis- 

 cussed which have no pertinence to the matter 

 in hand, j-et it will most undoubtedly prove 

 of great use to a large class of students, and, 

 we will add, to all teachers of vertebrate anat- 



