1884.] Scientific N 'omenciature, 213 
will at once mark their locality. On the other hand, I can 
most cordially protest against some recent barbarisms. 
When a writer concoCts such names as “ Darwinhydrous, 
Tyndallhydrous, Huxley hydrous, and Spencerhydrous ,” we may 
well ask, in alarm, what next ? The answer is perhaps 
supplied by the American entomologist who named an un- 
fortunate beetle Carahus know-nothing. 
But besides the names given to genera and species, some 
of a highly complex and ultra-classical character have lately 
been introduced into various departments of Biology. Surely 
a movement of this kind is a mistake when an increasing 
number of persons are studying Natural Science who are 
not classical scholars. No less surely the mistake is in- 
tensified if such words are introduced by an eminent official 
savant who opposes the predominance of classicalism in 
higher education, and yet by manufacturing such words 
makes it almost compulsatory. Needlessly to multiply 
technical terms of any origin is, I submit, a grave error. It 
is sad to see an able morphologist using such terms as 
“ caudad,” “ cephalad,” and the like, when tailwards, head- 
wards, &c., would express his meaning as precisely and more 
intelligibly. 
It will not, I trust, be thought an aimless digression if I 
call attention to the confusion which may arise from the use 
of one and the same term in various branches of Science 
with a different meaning. As an instance we may take the 
term “function,” used both in Physiology and in Mathe- 
matics. In the former, or rather in Biology generally, 
function is the particular work performed by some organ or 
tissue. Thus the decomposition of carbonic acid under the 
influence of light is the function of the chlorophyll granules 
of plants ; respiration is the function of the lungs, the gills, 
and the tracheae of animals, digestion of the stomach, &c. 
In Mathematics, on the contrary, a quantity is said to be 
a function of another, or of several others, when its value 
depends upon that or those of the latter. 
Such terms very rarely occasioned any ambiguity in former 
days, when the different sciences stood more isolated and 
more aloof from each other ; but now they supply each other 
not unfrequently both with faCts and methods, the confusion 
is beginning to be felt. Thus since quantitative determina- 
tions have been more and more introduced into biological 
researches, we may in them meet with the term “ function ” 
in its mathematical sense. 
A similar confusion may arise with the term “ elements.” 
Thus we have the “ elements ” of Chemistry, the undecom- 
