Again: for the term 'suroccipital' of Geoffroy, Mr. Owen proposes _paroccipital_, to avoid confusion and false suggestion: and with reference to this word, he makes a remark in agreement with what we have said in the discussion of Aphorism XXI.: namely, that the combination of different languages in the derivation of words, though to be avoided in general, is in some cases admissible. He says, 'If the purists who are distressed by such harmless hybrids as "mineralogy," "terminology," and "mammalogy," should protest against the combination of the Greek prefix to the Latin noun, I can only plead that servility to a particular source of the fluctuating sounds of vocal language is a matter of taste: and that it seems no unreasonable privilege to use such elements as the servants of thought; and in the interests of science to combine them, even though they come from different countries, when the required duty is best and most expeditiously performed by their combination.' So again we have illustrations of our Aphorism XII., that if terms are systematically good they are not to be rejected because they are etymologically inaccurate. In reference to that bone of the skull which has commonly been called _vomer_, the ploughshare: a term which Geoffroy rejected, but which Mr. Owen retains, he says, 'When Geoffrey was induced to reject the term _vomer_ as being applicable only to the peculiar form of the bone in a small portion of the vertebrata, he appears not to have considered that the old term, in its wider application, would be used without reference to its primary allusion to the ploughshare, and that becoming, as it {354} has, a purely arbitrary term, it is superior and preferable to any partially descriptive one.' Another condition which I have mentioned in Aphorism XX., as valuable in technical terms is, that they should be susceptible of such grammatical relations as their scientific use requires. This is, in fact, one of the grounds of the Aphorism which we have already borrowed from Mr. Owen, that we are to prefer single substantives to descriptive phrases. For from such substantives we can derive adjectives, and other forms; and thus the term becomes, as Mr. Owen says, _a better instrument of thought_. Hence, he most consistently mentions it as a recommendation of his system of names, that by them the results of a long series of investigations into the special homologies of the bones of the head are expressed in simple and definite terms, _capable of every requisite inflection_ to express the proportion of the parts.