The blunder of writing _predicate_ for _predict_ has become so widely diffused that it bids fair to render one of the most useful terms in the scientific vocabulary of Logic unintelligible. The mathematical and logical term "to eliminate" is undergoing a similar destruction. All who are acquainted either with the proper use of the word or with its etymology, know that to eliminate a thing is to thrust it out; but those who know nothing about it, except that it is a fine-looking phrase, use it in a sense precisely the reverse, to denote, not turning anything out, but bringing it in. They talk of _eliminating_ some truth, or other useful result, from a mass of details. I suspect that this error must at first have arisen from some confusion between _to eliminate_ and _to enucleate_.
Though no such evil consequences as take place in these instances, are likely to arise from the modern freak of writing _sanatory_ instead of sanitary, it deserves notice as a charming specimen of pedantry engrafted upon ignorance. Those who thus undertake to correct the spelling of the classical English writers, are not aware that the meaning of _sanatory_, if there were such a word in the language, would have reference not to the preservation of health, but to the cure of disease.
[16] _Historical Introduction_, vol. i. pp. 66-8.
[17] _History of Scientific Ideas_, ii. 110, 111.
[21] I say probably, not certainly, because this is not the consideration by which a botanist determines what shall or shall not be admitted as a species. In natural history those objects belong to the same species, which are, or consistently with experience might have been, produced from the same stock. But this distinction, in most, and probably in all cases, happily accords with the other. It seems to be a law of physiology, that animals and plants do really, in the philosophical as well as the popular sense, propagate their kind; transmitting to their descendants all the distinctions of Kind (down to the most special or lowest Kind) which they themselves possess.
[24] Dr. Whewell, in his reply (_Philosophy of Discovery_, p. 270) says that he "stopped short of, or rather passed by, the doctrine of a series of organized beings," because he "thought it bad and narrow philosophy." If he did, it was evidently without understanding this form of the doctrine; for he proceeds to quote a passage from his "History," in which the doctrine he condemns is designated as that of "a mere linear progression in nature, which would place each genus in contact only with the preceding and succeeding ones." Now the series treated of in the text agrees with this linear progression in nothing whatever but in being a progression.