We do but give names, and make descriptions of a thing, and of all its parts. Hence comes it that, after three thousand years of dissection, anatomy is still but a nomenclature, and has hardly advanced a step towards its true object, which is the science of animal economy. Furthermore, what defects are there not in the method itself, which should above all things else be simple and easy to be understood, depending as it does upon inspection and having denominations only for its end! For seeing that nomenclature has been mistaken for knowledge, men have made it their chief business to multiply names, instead of limiting things; they have crushed themselves under the burden of details, and been on the look out for differences where there was no distinction. When they had given a new name they conceived of it as a new thing, and described the smallest parts with the most minutious exactness, while the description of some still smaller part, forgotten or neglected by previous anatomists, has been straightway hailed as a discovery. The denominations themselves being often taken from things which had no relation to the object that it was desired to denominate, have served but to confound confusion. The part of the brain, for example, which is called testes and nates, wherein does it so differ from the rest of the brain that it should deserve a name? These names, taken at haphazard or springing from some preconceived opinion, have themselves become the parents of new prejudices and speculations; other names given to parts which have been ill observed, or which are even non-existent, have been sources of new errors. What functions and uses has it not been attempted to foist upon the pineal gland, and on the alleged empty space in the brain which is called the arch, the first of which is but a gland, while the very existence of the other is doubtful,--the empty space being perhaps produced by the hand of the anatomist and the method of dissection."[98] _The Genus felis._ In his preliminary remarks upon the lion, Buffon while still professing to believe in some considerable mutability of species, seems very far from admitting that all living forms are capable of modification. But he has shown us long since how clearly he saw the impossibility of limiting mutability, if he once admitted so much of the thin end of the wedge as that a horse and an ass might be related. It is plain, therefore, that he is not speaking "_au reel_" here, and we accordingly find him talking clap-trap about the nobleness of the lion in having no species immediately allied to it. A few lines lower on he reminds us in a casual way that the ass and horse are related. He writes:--