speak in
those comprehensive views which anatomy, taken in its widest
signification as a science, necessarily includes. While the anatomist
contents himself with describing the form and position of organs as they
appear exposed, layer after layer, by his dissecting instruments, he
does not pretend to soar any higher in the region of science than the
humble level of other mechanical arts, which merely appreciate the
fitting arrangement of things relative to one another, and combinative
to the whole design of the form or machine of whatever species this may
be, whether organic or inorganic. The descriptive anatomist of the human
body aims at no higher walk in science than this, and hence his
nomenclature is, as it is, a barbarous jargon of words, barren of all
truthful signification, inconsonant with nature, and blindly
irrespective of the cognitio certa ex principiis certis exorta.

Still, however, this anatomy of form, although so much requiring
purification of its nomenclature, in order to clothe it in the high
reaching dignity of a science, does not disturb the medical or surgical
practitioner, so far as their wants are concerned. Although it may, and
actually does, trammel the votary who aspires to the higher
generalizations and the development of a law of formation, yet, as this
is not the object of the surgical anatomist, the nomenclature, such as
it is, will answer conveniently enough the present purpose.

The anatomy of the human form, contemplated in reference to that of all
other species of animals to which it bears comparison, constitutes the
study of the comparative anatomist, and, as such, establishes the
science in its full intent. But the anatomy of the human figure,
considered as a species, per se, is confessedly the humblest walk of the
understanding in a subject which, as anatomy, is relationary, and
branches far and wide through all the domain of an animal kingdom. While
restricted to the study of the isolated human species, the cramped
judgment wastes in such narrow confine; whereas, in the expansive gaze
over all allying and allied species, the intellect bodies forth to its
vision the full appointed form of natural majesty; and after having
experienced the manifold analogies and differentials of the many, is
thereby enabled, when it returns to the study of the one, to view this
one of human type under manifold points of interest, to the appreciation
of which the understanding never wakens otherwise.