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have been prepared. We cannot certainly congratulate any one on the appearance of the plates. If they are so indistinct now what will they be after two thousand copies are printed off, if the edition should ever reach that number? The prospect however at present for this Series is not hopeful. There is no demand for the books, nor likely to be, perhaps for years to come.* The literary vacuum is supplied by the political daily papers and the weekly or monthly magazines. Even these latter do not as yet pay, nor is the demand for them very great. Two hundred copies of the newspaper, half a dozen of the Scientific Magazine and two or three dozen of the Globe and Illustrated magazines satisfy the demands at the capital. The literary and commercial prospect for the Text Series is therefore not very promising. It may, and doubtless will, be true, however, of this as of another condition, that it will grow by what it feeds on, and the lethargic sleep of the Chinese intellect will awake some day to the forces that are being brought to bear upon it. In illustration of our remark that the plates are wretched, take any complicated bone like the sphenoid or temporal, or a collection of bones as presented in the base of the skull, and try to understand it. The orginal drawings and not the electrotyping are most likely at fault. Water does not rise higher than the fountain. The Chinese are such beautiful drawers that there is no reason why good workmanship should not have been obtained. Their expert draughtsmen produce work which defies their own cutters. Frequently the drawings, especially on Chinese paper and with Chinese ink, look as well or better than the originals. I have seen sharp photographs so drawn on fans as almost to baffle detection. If China could not produce sufficiently good blocks, Japan was not very distant, and there the workmanship is as good as anything produced in London, or Paris, or Berlin. I have before me. the entire illustrations of Gray's Anatomy, done by Japanese artists, and they leave absolutely nothing to be desired. We could adopt them as they are for China were it not that they contain many Japanese characters, some unknown Chinese ones, and others whose signification or use has changed in China.

There is still room for a complete and minute work on descriptive and surgical anatomy, and such a work we believe will soon be forth-coming. The student will find Dr. Osgood's very suitable to begin with, but after he has mastered the mere elementary work, a larger

On the contrary there have been over $75.00 worth sold during the last six months.-PUBLISHERS Recorder.

The plates referred to are but stereotyped and not electrotyped; but even the very best electrotype plates would look "indistinct," if the press work was carelessly executed.-PUBLISHERS Recorder.

one will be desiderated. The title of the present work is in a certain sense misleading, Ch'uen-t'i-ch'an-wei H, leading one to suppose that the work was minute in the extreme; and the English title, Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical, indicates great minuteness, and as useful and necessary for the knowledge of surgery and surgical operations. Now the present is pretty much the reverse of all this. In relation to Chinese works and all preceding foreign translated works on the subject, the title is undoubtedly true, but in relation to the work of which it is an ostensible translation (for there is not a word said about abridgment, only that the order of the last American edition of Gray has been followed), it falls far short. It is like a modern tournament, of which we have somewhere read, that it was too much for a joke and too little to be in earnest.

We shall direct our present criticism to the Vocabulary of English and Chinese Anatomical Terms. And we shall do it in no carping or hypercritical spirit. We acknowledge the many good points about the work, and the happiness, correctness, and exactness of many of the coined expressions. At the same time a greater knowledge of Chinese and some acquaintance with the native works in medicine would have prevented much that must appear to the Chinese uncouth and barbarous. We admit frankly the difficulty of a nomenclature, and we appreciate fully the remark in the preface "that in regard to some of the terms, the author himself was not fully satisfied, but he was unable to substitute others that seemed to him as appropriate." A review of the work, therefore, in the pages of the Recorder, pointing out errors and misprints, misapprehensions and mistranslations, may not be uninteresting as a study of Chinese medicine, and prove a help to readers of the work and future labourers in the same field. A careful study of two or three native works on medicine would supply us with an ample nomenclature for the names of the bones and regions of the body. Having these it is not difficult to fix names for muscles, arteries, veins, nerves, &c., that derive their names from regions. The plethora of names in Chinese is one of our great difficulties. There are nearly twice as many names of bones as there are actual bones in the body. According to Chinese cosmogony there must be at least 360 bones in the body, to tally with the number of days in the year. Each bone process is named by some osteol character, thus multiplying the number of bones beyond all reason. If to the book-names, we add the colloquial, we have a rich vocabulary of such osteological names. The Chinese are so utterly ignorant of the brain, that it matters but little. what terms we there employ, provided they are sufficiently striking, distinctive, descriptive, and harmonize with the other parts of our

nomenclature. A good plan here is perhaps to follow our Western terms, the translation of which in most cases, gives a very good name in Chinese.

There are not a few blemishes in the Vocabulary which charity comples us, as is natural and usual, to lay at the door of the printer, and defective proof reading; such for example as "caroted" for carotid; "stylod" for styloid; frequent want of hyphens in words that ought to be connected, and vice versâ; "tympanitic" for tympanic; "hemorroidal" for hæmorroidal; "bartholine" for Bartholine; "Glaserian" for Glasserian, "eminance" for eminence, "alveola" for alveolar, inverted S's in large numbers. Carotid is not once spelt correctly, and it occurs very frequently. Sleep in ancient times was supposed to be obtained by pressing these vessels, hence the Greek verb and our use of the term.

Another set of errors consists in putting the wrong word in English for the Chinese or vice versâ, such as "chyme" for urine; another set having English words but no equivalent Chinese, and vice versâ here also. Another set consists in the English and Chinese lines not corresponding, a transposition of the English or of the Chinese, as e.g. pancreatic juice is the juice of the large and small intestines. A glance at the succeeding line and its opposite indicates the transposition. In some places phrases in English are left out, as e.g. the bones of the head are divided into four groups, while only three are specified. Or again, great confusion is evident at the beginning of the list on Neurology, in dividing the nervous system, and again the cerebro-spinal axis. The spinal cord is included in the encephalon. These errors, it may be said, are trivial and are easily corrected by any one giving the subject a moment's consideration, still they are blemishes which more careful superintendence ought to have avoided.

We come now to point out graver errors which are not so easy of detection, and which lead to much misunderstanding and confusion; and in our present remarks we shall confine ourselves principally to the osteological and nervous terms, leaving our criticisms of the rest to another opportunity.

Organic and animal matter are both called sheng-chih. If the latter be organic matter only, what becomes of the vegetable kingdom; and if the former, which would include both, be specially limited to the vegetable, what becomes of the animal kingdom? The same confusion exists with regard to inorganic and earthy matter-a distinction being sought to be drawn between t'u and tit. There is as much reason for no distinction between these two as between the

* Webster gives tympanitic as correct, and also gives hemorrhoidal, which mode of spelling has been followed in at least five instances that we have noticed.PUBLISHERS Recorder.

organic and animal matter. The Chinese mode of dealing with the subject is entirely different. The animal kingdom is tung hor hwo-tung-wu; the vegetable is chih-wu ; and the inorganic is sz-wu. The combination tung-chih-chih K would be organic matter and sz-chih inorganic. This division is open, of course, to various objections; we offer it merely as Chinese. The word for sensation, chioh-wu, means rather to awake to a sense of, to catch the idea, to understand, and refers to the knowledge of a thing formerly unknown. It is applied elsewhere and perhaps correctly to organs of sense. The preferable word here for sensation would be chi-chioh. The word cell is translated sheng-chu , but it lays itself open to the objection that the pearl is solid, whereas the very principle of a cell is that it should be the reverse, and hence our own name. The air-cell is however properly called ch'i-p'au. A new word is coined for the sympathetic selfharmonising tsz-ho. This may not be bad, but probably it would have been as well to have retained Hobson's expression-the many-knotted-referring to the ganglia. By the way, in Hobson's Vocabulary, chih, for joint, is given wrongly as the character. The word invariably given for nerves is brain-tendons. The question naturally asked by every Chinaman who hears the expression for the first time is, Has the brain tendons or ligaments? The addition of ch'i would have obviated this objection. The short phrase is however exceedingly handy. The short-lived name for veins (returning vessels)

for

for

would require, for clearness, the term blood. The pulsating vessels is clear enough. The Japanese use the expression "moving pulse" and "silent vessels". The word for cartilage is given as jen-kuh tough or elastic bone, and under fibre the same character, written in another form, is given. Why write two characters that are the same? For fibre, I presume is meant fibro-cartilage. The hyaline form is called tz porcelain, when glass would have been nearer the mark, and the permanent is called . Words in Chinese frequently go in pairs or opposites; why not have adopted chang or chieu permanent, in opposition to for temporary. The word fah hair is only applied to the hair of the head. Chia for nails is written not. The word for pancreas is copied from Hobson and called the "sweet-bread," but surely careful investigation would have shown that the Chinese have a word for this viscus. Mucus is given as t'i, but this expression is confined to nasal mucus. The skin nomenclature is in the utmost confusion. For derma or cutis, the true skin, we have piau, which simply means the outside as contrasted with the inside. The phrase piau-li outside and inside is very

common and universally understood. The epidermis is improperly called wai-fu. The fu alone without the wai is the epidermis. The phrase wai-p'i, outside skin, means the same thing. The papillary layer is given as J, whereas this character is applied to what is inside the skin and outside of the muscles, equivalent to p'i-li. The lower surface of the derma, the pars reticularis, might have been so termed but the pars papillaris is its upper surface, and therefore the expression is inapplicable. The word for excretions is

not happy, the useless juices, among which is enumerated bile. Now we always thought that bile, besides being an excretion, played an important part in the digestive process. Hobson speaks of the excretory functions, and designates them the ch'u wu-yung chin-ye kungyung. The word ch'u is all-important. The word for squamous is given ask, instead doubtless of. It is difficult to divine why the character ma for horse has been introduced into mastoid which simply means nipple. The single character for this would have sufficed. The Chinese have a particular name for this portion of bone and call it the wan-kuh. The three-corner stone

for petrous portion is not happy. The Japanese term yen simply, is enough. The term for zygomatic process is not bad, the buttress of the malar or cheek bone,-but the Chinese have an expression of their own for it. The word kung is applied to canal and foramen or opening. The character refers to the latter and the word canal, sometimes translated kwan, not in itself bad, should have had another word such as road. We want to reserve the word kwan for the vessels that lie in such a canal or road. The greater and lesser wings of the sphenoid are termed i, and the pterygoid processes nei-wai-chi. There is here a little confusion. Extended wings are usually called chi, unextended wings i . Those of the bat for example are never termed i, but invariably chi. This latter term should have been used for the larger wings, and i reserved for the pterygoid. The Japanese, however, use the i for all the wings. The distinction is drawn but it may be an overfine one. For the sella turcica the word saddle, without horse, is quite sufficient. In the nomenclature of the sphenoid bone, the word cavernous sinus, should be cavernous groove; (in the ethmoid bone, the plate of that name is called cribiform); the foramen ovale is unfortunately called lau-k'ung (testes) from the shape, when ovoid or chang-yuen would have expressed it. In the name of the Otic ganglion we have the same unfortunate character reproduced. It appears again with more reason in Fallopian tubes and the ovaries, although, as we do not name such female organs in English by male

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