IN GREAT BRITAIN. 
463 
in plain and simple language, but for each other in an un ¬ 
known tongue. By this, I mean not a foreign or dead 
language, but a peculiar style and phrase which no one can 
understand unless he be initiated; unless he have studied 
the science itself so intensely that he has also learned the 
jargon in which it is conveyed; in short, no one but a 
thorough anatomist can understand the language of anatomy, 
nor can even he understand it without some labour. Ana¬ 
tomists have buried their science under the rubbish of names ; 
there is not a difficult, a hard-sounding word upon which they 
have any claim that they have not retained; they have 
choked their subject with useless minutiae.” An anatomist, 
for example, will describe an artery as “going to the radial 
edge of the second metacarpal bone, then supplying the 
abductor and flexor muscles, then going along the bone of 
the first phalanx, seated upon this second metacarpal bone,” 
with many other distortions, ambiguities, and little contri¬ 
vances to conceal (as one would believe), that he is describing 
so simple a matter as the artery of the fore finger, which the 
reader at last finds out either by some lucky chance, or by 
reflecting how many metacarpal bones there are, and then 
reckoning them first forwards and then backwards, that he 
may be sure which it is that the author means ; for his author 
may count from the little finger towards the thumb, or from 
the thumb towards the little finger; or he may have a fancy of 
leaving out the thumb, and reckoning only four. What must 
be the surprise of a well-educated young man when he reads 
those books which he must study, of the regions of the elbow, 
or thumb, or fore finger ? And if an anatomist understands 
such things with difficulty, how distressing must they be to 
the student? 
This scholastic jargon, which has so long been the pride of 
anatomists and the disgrace of their science , which has given 
young men a dislike for the more useful of all their studies, 
it is now full time to banish from our schools. These are the 
authors who avoid plainness as if it were meanness ; who are 
studious of hard words, as if they constituted the perfections 
of science —“ it is their trade, it is their mystery to write ob¬ 
scurely,” and full surely does the student feel it. 
Want of arrangement, again, has still worse effects. Con¬ 
fusion is a monster in science ; and Thompson has, in his 
( Man of the Moon/ described such a thing with great spirit 
and life:—“A creature, if that may be called a creature 
which had no shape nor form, next rolled towards him, ap¬ 
proaching still nearer and nearer, and, by various glances and 
movements, seemed to indicate a sympathy with man: it 
