4 THE NAUTILUS. 



NOTES AND NEWS. 



Mr. A. A. Hinkley is making a collecting trip to Alabama. 



EDITORS NAUTILUS : 



In the course of some remarks on the '' Museum Boltenianum," 

 Dr. Pilsbry In the October NAUTILUS refers to the '' free use of 

 polynomials " in that work, citing some supposed examples, and sug- 

 gesting that no one who could " swallow these ought to choke over 

 Chemnitz." 



The general question of the acceptability of Bolten's work is too 

 large to enter upon here, and I believe it has been practically settled 

 in a sense adverse to the arguments I used twenty years ago, and 

 which Dr. Pilsbry now reiterates. But the matter of " polynom- 

 ials " can be settled right here. Bolten used polynomials as much 

 and no more than Linne and Gmelin, 1758-1792. Let us remember 

 that Bolten's work was a posthumous MS. printed without revision 

 by the writer. It contains 2409 entries of species. Of these 64 are 

 what Dr. Pilsbry refers to as " polynomials." (The ' Murex mitra 

 episcopafis," by the way, is not one of them, and does not occur in 

 the book as far as I can discover ; " Mitra episcopalis " is there all 

 right.) 



Now Bolten's polynomials are partly hyphenated ; part of them 

 are words which we now combine in one word (as " mille puncta- 

 tutn ") ; a lot of them are taken from Gmelin or Linne (as " caput 

 serpentis," '" lingua fells,'" etc.), and have always been in use ; others 

 are geographical (as "Novae zedandise" "Bonse spei "), and have also 

 been in use continuously to this day ; all of them are either sub- 

 stantive phrases like " pes-asininus" or adjective combinations like 

 " <itro-viridis," which we now use and write as one word. In the 

 whole sixty-four there is only a single case where something like a 

 Chemnitzian polynomial occurs, when to the name of the shell 

 " sinistrorsa " is added, indicating that the specimen was reversed. 

 Now exactly such polynomials occur in the work of Linne and most 

 of the older writers after 1758, and have been accepted as valid 

 without demur. Even D'Orbigny as late as 1853 indulged in at 

 least one. While we may regard them as awkward and objection- 

 able, they are not incompatible with the Linnean nomenclature, and 

 have never been so considered. 



The polynomials of Martini and Chemnitz, on the other hand, are 

 simply descriptive phrases or brief sentences ; the dwindled rem- 

 nants of the earlier " nomen triv iale " of pre-Linnean authors, and do 

 not come under the same class as those above cited from Linne and 

 Bolten. In short, with access to the book and a little comparison, 

 Dr. Pilsbry could soon satisfy himself that, on the score of regular 

 nomenclature, there can be no possible objection to Bolten. 



WM. H. DALL. 



