Zool.— Vol. I.] MILLER— GREEK AND LATIN DERIVATIVES. 131 



gists look at them. If we could assume that they were ad- 

 jectives, it would puzzle one to discover why one pise is is 

 feminine, another masculine and a third neuter. It is the 

 same with aves, reptilia, plantae, etc.; and the word 

 chosen for the assumed adjectives to agree with would be 

 arbitrarily chosen and would have little chance of corre- 

 sponding with the idea in the mind of the coiner when he 

 named bis genus. 



40 To say that epi-gramma, melo-drama, acro-polis, 

 macro- cosmus, leonto -cephale, chaen - alopex, 

 Helles-pontus, pyx-acantha, hippo-dromus, and 

 hundreds of others are not nouns, but adjectives used sub- 

 stantively with some imaginable word understood, is no less 

 absurd than to deny that cyclo-stoma, di-delphys, etc., 

 may be nouns of the same sort and subject to the same laws. 

 And yet that theory which would make adjectives of all 

 these words tells us that even mega-therium is not a 

 noun but a neuter adjective modifying animal or mon- 

 strum understood, and that it is subject to the inflection 

 megatherius, megatheria, megatherium, etc.! It 

 is, therefore, properly derived, we are informed, not from 

 /jLeya-\-6t]ptov directly, but from a fieya-d-^pt-o^ sc. Oijp, '« 

 great-beastly animal.'' That is, to be sure, a perfectly legit- 

 imate course to take in order to get megatherium, but it 

 is no more likely that it was obtained in that way than it is 

 that the discoverer of cyclo-stoma did not simply put 

 together KVK\os-\-<TTo/j,a, but first built an adjective kvk\6- 

 <tto/j,o<;,-ov, then turned that into Latin cyclo-stomus, 

 -um , and then arbitrarily manufactured a feminine cyclo- 

 stoma to agree with piscis, masculine, understood! The 

 classical precedent for forms in -stomus, masc. and fern., 

 -stomum, neut., is poly-stomus, masc. and fem., 

 poly-stomum, neut. The only rational way to form either 

 would be /j-eya-\-6r]ptov and kvk\o — \-aro/xa. And as cyclo- 

 stoma goes, so must go the rest of the words in -stoma, 



41 -soma, etc. In general, it is arbitrary and inexact to make 

 adjectives of three endings in Latin out of Greek adjectives 

 of two endings. The old Latinists used the form in -us for 



