170 REPORT — 1846. 



It may well be conceived with what a formidable load of names the me- 

 mory must have been burthened, if any could have been found equal to it, 

 had the anatomy of animals continued and made progress under its primitive 

 condition of an assemblage of arbitrarily described and uncompared facts. 



Happily the natural tendency of the human mind to sort and generalize its 

 ideas could not long permit such a state of the science, if science it could be 

 called, to remain. A large and valuable portion of the labours of the com- 

 parative anatomists who have honoured the present century, has been devoted 

 to the determination of those bones in the lower animals which correspond 

 with bones in the human skeleton ; the results being usually expressed by 

 applying to the parts so determined the same names, as far as the nomen- 

 clature of anthropotomy allowed. Few, however, of the parts of the human 

 body have received single substantive names ; they are for the most part in- 

 dicated by shorter or longer descriptive phrases, like the species and parts of 

 plants before Linnaeus reformed botanical nomenclature. 



The temptation to devise a systematic Nomenclature of Anatomy, generally 

 applicable to all animals, increases with the advance of the science, and from 

 the analogy of what has taken place in other sciences it may one day be 

 yielded to and exercise the ingenuity of some ardent reformer. But the same 

 analogy, especially that afforded by chemical science since the time of Lavoi- 

 sier, would rather lead the true friend of anatomy to deprecate the attempt 

 to impose an entirely new nomenclature of parts, however closely expressive 

 of the nature and results of the science at the period when it might be devised. 

 For there is no stability in such descriptive or enunciative nomenclature; it 

 changes, and must change with the progress of the science, and thus becomes 

 a heavy tax upon such progress. 



If the arbitrary term ' calomel,' which, like ' house' and 'dog,' signifies the 

 thing in its totality, without forcing any particular quality of its subject 

 prominently upon the mind, be preferable, on that account as well as its 

 brevity, to the descriptive phrases ' submuriate of mercury,' ' chloride of 

 mercury,' or ' proto-chloride of mercury,' in enunciating propositions respect- 

 ing the substance to which it is applied ; and if it possesses the additional ad- 

 vantage of fixity, of a steady meaning not liable to be affected, like a descrip- 

 tive name or phrase, by every additional knowledge of the properties of the 

 substance; the anatomist, zealous for the best interests of his science, will feel 

 strongly the desirableness of retaining and securing for the subjects of his 

 propositions similar single, arbitrary terms, especially if they are also capable 

 of being inflected and used as noun adjectives. 



The practice of anatomists of the soundest judgement has usually been, 

 to transfer the anthropotomical term or phrase to the answerable part when 

 detected in other animals. The objection that the original descriptive or 

 otherwise allusive meaning of the term seldom applies to the part with equal 

 force in other animals, and sometimes not at all, is one of really little moment; 

 for the term borrowed from anthropotomy is soon understood in an arbitrary 

 sense, and without regard to its applicability to the modified form which 

 the namesake of the human bone commonly assumes to suit the ends required 

 in the lower species. No anatomist, for example, troubles himself with the 

 question of the amount of resemblance to a crow's or other bird's beak in the 

 'coracoid' bone of a reptile, or with the want of likeness of the kangaroo's 

 ' coccyx' to the beak of a cuckoo ; or of the whale's ' vomer ' to a plough- 

 share ; or ever associates the idea of the original mystic allusion in the ana- 

 tomical term 'sacrum' with his description of that bone in the megatherium 

 or other monster. Common sense gratefully accepts such names when they 

 become as arbitrary as cat or calomel, and wmen such concretes or adjectives 

 as ' coccygeal,' ' vomerine ' and ' sacral ' can be employed to teach the pro- 

 perties or accidents of their subjects. 



