CORRESPONDENCE. 



Names, Names, Names. 



Will you allow a Philistine and a heretic to occupy a small portion of your 

 space upon a matter of serious moment to those students of Natural History who 

 are not systematic zoologists, namely, the burdens that are being created for them 

 by the eccentric and apparently wanton multiplication of names? Two books on 

 Reptiles have just been published, one a new volume of the great catalogue of the 

 Reptilia in the British Museum, the other a volume of the special monograph on 

 the Reptiles in Godman and Salvin's " Biologia Centrali-Americana." These two 

 works have come out within a year of one another. They are written by specialists, 

 who are both distinguished men, and both officers of the same Museum. It is 

 assuredly a pity that in these two works, in a large number of cases, the same forms 

 not merely have different names, but are put in different genera. 



If nomenclature is to become more and more dependent on the personal equation 

 of the particular writer, it will cease to have any use or meaning. At the best it is 

 merely the index of our knowledge, and to multiply indices to the book of Nature is 

 not to arrange but to confuse. 



I hope I shall be forgiven for what I have said. The matter is a serious one to 

 some of us, and the particular case I have selected is a gocd case, since it is an 

 instance of two big men placing a heavy burden on a large number o'f small ones. 



Henry H. Howorth. 



[Before we comment on the remarkable state of affairs to which Sir Henry 

 Howorth calls our attention, we invite explanations from the parties immediately 

 interested. — Ed.] 



Fresh-Water Fishes of New South Wales. 



It is not so many years ago since the Murray River system of Australia was 

 credited with the possession of a fish-fauna peculiarly its own ; I speak, of course, 

 exclusively of edible fishes, all the smaller forms of fish life being contemptuously 

 ignored by our transmontane neighbours. The principal genera on which this dis- 

 tinction was conferred were Oligonts, Ctenohites, and Macquaria ( = Mvrrayia,= 

 Riverina). 



Many years ago the Murray Cod was proved to be a native of the Richmond 

 and Clarence rivers district, which rivers drain the north-eastern watershed of New 

 South Wales ; it was always, however, a disputed point whether the species was indi- 

 genous to these rivers, had been introduced thereto by human or other agencies, or 

 had simply crossed the borderland between the two systems during a season of 

 exceptional flood. Be this as it may, the discovery, by the naturalists of the 

 " Challenger " Expedition, of both the Murray Cod [Oligonts macquariensis) and the 

 Golden Perch (Ctenolates ambiguus) in the Mary River, Queensland, where there can 

 be no question of introduction, at once nullifies the claims of the Murray River and 

 its tributaries to the exclusive possession of these two species, while at the same 

 time it strengthens the claim of our north-eastern rivers to the former species as 

 truly indigenous. 



These defections left Macquaria australasica, with its numerous Castelnauic 

 synonyms, as the sole remaining species peculiar to the Murray system, which 

 position it has held unchallenged from the time of the " Challenger " discoveries until 

 now. However, in a small collection of fresh-water fishes, forwarded to me from 



