NOMENCLATURE. 
or 
those small parts but even the largest. They have attributed certain functions to certain organs, without 
being informed if, in other animals, although deprived of these organs, the same functions are not exercised. 
In all those explications which they have wished to give of the different parts of the animal economy, they 
have had the double disadvantage of having first attacked the subject the most complicated, and afterwards 
of haying reasoned upon that subject without the foundations of relations, and without the helps of analogy. 
What real knowledge can we derive from the study of an isolated object? The foundation of every science, 
is it not in the comparison which the human mind can make between objects similar and dissimilar, their 
analogous properties and the contraries, and between all their relative qualities? Thus every time that, in 
methodising, we restrict ourselves to a subject, which we contemplate solely and independently of all things 
which resemble it and which differ from it, we can never arrive at any real knowledge, still less elevate 
ourselves to any general principle ; we can do nothing more than give names and make descriptions of the 
thing and all its parts.” 
In the progress of the cultivation of every science, there comes a period when the inquiring mind 
after having exhausted every source of new facts, turns to the task of peneralisation, and these generalisations 
being founded upon the comparisons of forms or of phenomena, it thus arrives at the recognition of 
those broad truths which are the mind's final aim and object, and which spring inevitably as the consequence 
of facts accumulated, and held in comparison with each other ; this is eminently the case in that science 
named Comparative Anatomy. | ) 
Those who first described the human form as it isolatedly presented itself, were followed by those who 
perused the animal forms, such as they severally presented themselves, and these latter anatomists have 
been followed by those who, benefitting by foregone labour in the record of facts observed, have sorted 
such facts according to their relationary analogies, and given the various gathering an order, binding them 
together with that belt of the generalisation which speaks of their common unity of character, and such 
was the idea meant to be conveyed in the name “vertebrated type,” of the animal figures.* 
But it was the human anatomist who first established for the science this name “ vertebra,’ as 
attaching to certain osseous elements of the spinal axis, whilst the comparative anatomist borrowing the 
name, and taught by certain ideas associated with such form to distinguish it in all the skeleton figures 
noticed by him, has drawn his generalisation upon this supposed invariable element of the endoskeleton, 
and named them “vertebrated” at the same time that he failed to characterise its typical development 
upon a comparison of all its varying conditions of growth. Thus this figure named “vertebra,” had been 
carried as the implement of generalisation over multiform facts observed by the comparative anatomist, 
notwithstanding that it was known to be a name applied to certain variously developed figures of even the 
human spine, by the special anatomist, who had never looked beyond his limited sphere of observation. 
* Lamarck characterised the two great divisions of the Animal Kingdom, as ‘‘ Les animaux yertébres’’ and ‘* Les animaux sans 
vertébres,’’ and again subdivided these two into classes, viz., Mammalia, Birds, Reptiles, Fishes, &c., &e. The ‘ Typical vertebra ”’ 
is that unknown osseous quantity which comparative osteology seeks to determine even at the present day, and as if it were a 
something implying more meaning than what Lamarck supposed it to contain when naming the four higher classes as “‘ Vertebrate 
animals.” Still in the following remark the originator of the name ‘‘ Vertebrated ’’ seems to doubt the efficiency of it, or any mode 
of classification or nomenclature used in subdividing the continuity of the chain of nature. He writes, ‘Mais j’ai déji montré 
quil est un produit de lart “et que, malgré les apparences contraires, il ne tient réellement rien de la nature.’’— Philosophie 
Zoologique ; tome premier, chap. v., p. 103. 
Cc 
