"The general goal of this book was to provide a comprehensive, systematic defined vocabulary for describing the nervous sytem in general and the human nervous system in particular. This was approached by developing two major interrelated features. The first is the Lexicon. It provides for each standard term in the defined vocabulary a literature citation for the first use of the term; a textual definition including method used to describe the part, age, species, and sex to which the definition applies; a citation for the discovery of the part; and a list of other terms including alternate spellings, translations, synonyms, and those that partly correspond. The second feature is the comprehensive and systematic set of Nomenclature Tables based on the standard terms...an historical approach was taken starting at the beginning of surviving written documentation from the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt about 3,700 years ago."