NOMENCLATURE AND CLASSIFICATIONS. 155 



were exact and of such a character as to definitely indicate a particular organism 

 as the one intended. Many pages would be insufficient if the description is vague 

 and contradictory and does not enable the scientific public to fix upon a particular 

 organism as the one intended. The careful work of subsequent investigators may 

 sometimes lead an author to say that he meant to designate such or such organisms 

 by his names, but if he really described something different or made no intelligible 

 descriptions, then his names can only be regarded as equivalent to nominn nnda and 

 should never be substituted for later ones given after careful study and description 

 of the organism. Any other course puts a premium on bad work. In case of the 

 higher plants and animals, preserved specimens will often serve to correct a faulty 

 description and to indicate clearly the object to which the name was applied. Cultures 

 of particular bacteria kept alive by means of frequent transfers to fresh culture-media 

 will also serve the same purpose when they are able to run the gauntlet of extermina- 

 tion by other organisms accidentally introduced during some one of the many trans- 

 fers, and when they have not varied too greatly from the original type as a result of 

 changed environment, but dead and dry organisms, in most cases, offer only a most 

 dubious and uncertain means of identification. Who, for example, would under- 

 take to determine what is included under the name Bacterium termo in von Thue- 

 meii's dried collection, No. 1000 ? The name Bacterium gummis affords a good 

 example of what the writer has in mind. Bacillus vascnlariim solani, Bacillus canlir- 

 orits, Bacillus gossypina, and Micrococcus pellncidns are also examples of names given 

 unaccompanied by any proper description of the organism. Many additional ones 

 might be cited. There is no lack. To found, for example, a new species of rabbit 

 on the observation that a small jumping animal about the size and shape of a rabbit 

 had congregated in certain turnip fields and caused great damage and apparently 

 had destroyed no other plants would only serve to provoke a smile or to raise a 

 doubt as to the author's mental condition, and yet descriptions equally worthless 

 are not at all uncommon in systematic bacteriology. The Micrococcus pellncidns, 

 although published quite recently and in the Comptes Rendus of the French 

 Academy, is not described any better. " I find it quite impossible," says Mr. Stod- 

 clert, " to identify many species from published descriptions." Numerous complaints 

 of this sort, made in recent years by well-trained and competent men, sufficiently 

 indicate the necessity of a thoroughgoing reform. 



Various more or less arbitrary dates have been assumed by zoologists and 

 botanists as the proper beginning of species priority, none of which can be used in 

 bacteriology. In the opinion of the writer the only proper starting point is from 

 the time when bacteriologists were first able to make and easily maintain pure 

 cultures of any given organism, namely, from the discovery of the poured-plate 

 method of isolation in the year iSSi. Nearly all species characterization prior 

 to this time is a cloudland of uncertainty, and while it may be possible fifty 

 or a hundred years from now, when the whole field of bacteriology, as we now 

 understand it, shall have been thoroughly worked over, to decide by the doctrine of 

 exclusion, with some degree of probability, what was meant by certain old names, 

 nothing whatever can to-day be made out of the description accompanying these 

 names. And here I wish to register a protest against anything of this nature ever 

 being done. If, in his own generation, a name can not be associated beyond doubt 



