4 INTRODUCTION. 
already established in the schools certain fixed ideas regarding that design of the osseous skeleton which 
the human figure exhibits ; whilst the comparative anatomist, taught upon the nomenclature of the former, 
carried his own observation into a more extended field of inquiry, and after having found certain plans of 
animal development manifesting characters sufficiently varied from what he had been at first led to expect, 
he himself next owned the propriety of either extending that nomenclature of anatomical science in such rise 
that it should include all additional facts of those seeming new creations, or else that each animal plan, 
such as it presented itself, should have a particular nomenclature of its own, according to its peculiarities, | 
The human skeleton fabric had been described by the special anatomist in the light of an unalterable 
design of connected parts ; those parts presenting themselves as elements dissimilar to one another, but 
all combining to render the form a complete entirety. In this completed figure were described such 
elemental dissimilars as the craniofacial apparatus, the column of vertebral bones, the costal thorax, the 
scapulary and pelvic pairs of limbs. Furthermore, in each of these apparatus were also described the many 
contributive elemental ossicles found in each, thus the ossicles of the skull were counted by the special 
anatomist, so, in like manner; were those of the vertebral column, also those of the thorax, and those of 
the limbs ; and education thus commenced upon a demonstration of the human figure, had so bent the nied ; 
to a special reading of this particular, that the names skull, vertebre, cost, and limbs whenever used in 
description of other skeleton designs, did not fail to recall certain fixed ideas in reference to that condition 
of development and arrangement in which those several parts appeared in the human body alone; even 
the ideas of the comparative anatomist when he contemplated those parts similarly named in the animal 
classes, notwithstanding their surprising varieties both in actual structure, and the relation of skull, vertebral 
column, thorax, and limbs to one another, referred for ever to the plan of the human form as standard, 
and upon this has all comparison been drawn. | 
At the period when special anatomy wrote its nomenclature, descriptive of the human framework, it 
drew its comparisons and analogies not according to the nature of an animal kingdom and unity in variety, 
for as yet the comparative science, referring Nature to herself, was unknown, but according to things 
extraneous to the person of animal nature, and hence foreign to the theme and purpose of anatomical pursuit. 
Tt is from this source that anatomy possesses the names coccygeal, coracoid, sacral, vertebral, clavicular, 
innominate ; names which, however fitting they may prove to be for surgical records, possess no meaning 
consonant with the reality of knowledge derivable from comparative rule. The comparison of certain animal 
structures to a clavis, a xoxkvs, a xopag, and (when imagination failed to conjure up an analogue for 
anatomical fact from out of the mechanic’s armamentaria) the naming of an animal structure as “nameless,” 
as sacrifick, as fibular, or xiphoid, and such like vandal barbarisms of nomenclature originated in ignorance, 
became afterwards obstructive to the light of comparative reasoning by which Nature was made to interpret 
herself. To this effect Buffon remarks :—“ For three thousand years,” says this author,* “have they been 
dissecting human bodies, and the science of anatomy is as yet but a nomenclature, and hardly have they 
advanced but a few paces towards its real object, which is the science of the animal economy. We have 
thousands of volumes written in-description of the human body. In man they have recognised, named, and . 
described the smallest parts, whilst as yet they are ignorant if in other animals they could also find not only 
* Tome vii., pages 21, 22, 24. 
