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NOMENCLATURE. 3 
for the first time discerns a broad and relationary subject which binds, as with a cincture, those multitudinous 
facts (oeeLEE and from the first recognition of this homology of plan in which they are produced, this 
mind engages in the task of sorting all similar figures which bear a reference to some standard unity of 
original fashioning, and from out of the otherwise indiscriminate mass elaborates for itself a generalisation 
which is the mind’s repose in reason and in truth. 
As it has ever been the natural course that the expansion of the human mind into its adult vigour of 
perfection should cancel all its earlier interpretations of objects, seeing that these interpretations have been 
the offspring of inexperience, and in nowise suitable to its present stage of reason, which has established its 
creed upon the more extended view of facts infinitely multiplied ; so is it also with the course of development 
for any one of the natural sciences. And as to the interpretation of form or phenomena, such as it was 
given in the infancy of anatomical science (the facts observed having been as yet very few in number), when 
such interpretation is laid side by side with that which has originated upon a more generalised survey, 
this latter. reading must necessarily cancel the former, for it is an impossibility that that nomenclature which 
ee been founded upon the abvenratien of a particularity can be rendered inclusive of all those after multiplied 
facts of form such as they present themselves under the law of unity in variety, and of this the present 
state of anatomical science, as delivered in the schools, gives striking evidence. 
Thus the human figure, upon the contemplation of which has originated anatomical nomenclature, is 
now known to stand as an individual design of connected parts, a special variety included in the great scale 
or general type of vertebrated animals, and those names which are made use of as applicable to a description 
of it, are far from being also applicable to a description of each and all the varieties of the skeleton plans 
or designs, and hence cause doubts. to arise in the mind as to whether such nomenclature be truthfully, be 
philosophically founded upon the nature of a law. The nomenclature originated upon the observation of any 
special form amongst the vertebrated skeletons is known at length to be imexpressive of the skeleton 
varieties ; hence must this figure of the human skeleton be now interpreted in its specialty of plan. by 
that nomenclature which is possible to be drawn from an observation of that general rule named “ unity 
of type,”* which is everywhere manifested throughout the four classes of the eniloceclovan ie tre: ; for it is 
reasonable to expect that that interpretation of the laws of form which shall spring in the human mind upon 
a comparison of facts accumulated, shall be a nearer approach to the only truthful reading in which this 
particular fact of form, viz., the human figure, is to be rendered. 
Anatomical’ nomenclature, founded originally in description of the human figure, remained unchallenged 
as to its fitness, g0 long as the science of the comparative anatomist rested as yet’ umawakened to the true 
interest of its subject, which is the comprehension ae a law ; and for a certain period, in the slow advance of 
Comparative Anatomy, the same nomenclature was accounted amply sufficient for the description of the 
human form, and all those other examples of the skeleton fabric which had been viewed in reference to it 
as to some standard type. The human anatomist, busied only in observation of his isolated subject, had 
* Geoffroy St. Hilaire, in his studies of Comparative Osteology, adopts this phrase ; and concluding that all animals are 
created ‘sur le méme plan,”’ that ‘“‘unité de composition organique” prevails through the Animal Kingdom, gives this as the most 
general corollary of his ‘Theorie des analogues.’”,—See Principes de Philosophie Zoologique ; Philosophie Anatomique ; 
Paris, tom. i., 1818, tom. ii, 1822; Memoires du Museum ad’ Hist. Nat., Vol. ix.; Annales du Museum d’Hist. Nat., 
Vols. ix., et x. 
