l895 . NOTES AND COMMENTS. 87 



tendency of modern nomenclature is to render it less and less depen- 

 dent " on the personal equation of the particular writer." Existing 

 confusion has arisen from two distinct causes. First, in old 

 times different names were given by writers to the same species, 

 because they ignored or were ignorant of each other's work ; the 

 name given by the most arrogant writer was as a rule the one 

 that usurped the field, at all events until the law of priority was 

 put in force. Second, ignorance either of facts previously published, 

 or of facts as yet undiscovered, caused the reference of many species 

 to the wrong genera. To retain for such species the names by which 

 they were described originally, as Dr. D. Sharp once suggested, would 

 be to render names of no meaning, to turn them into mere numbers 

 in a catalogue, and to abrogate the Linnsean system. 



These two facts account sufficiently for the existence of different 

 names for the same animals. To complain of the regrettable fact 

 that two persons should take different views of the same question is 

 merely to cry out against human nature. Personally, we are on the 

 side of the more modern view. We think that the law of priority, 

 dating from an accepted standard like the tenth edition of Linnaeus's 

 ■" Systema Naturae," must determine the specific name, and that the 

 reference of species to genera must depend upon the completest and 

 surest anatomical information, however much such may disguise 

 familiar animals under unfamiliar names. But in these matters there 

 is room for " personal equation " ; in the matter of anatomy always ; 

 in the matter of the first specific name, when the type-specimen is 

 unknown or the description vague. It is little wonder that there may 

 be capable zoologists of conservative habit who prefer the names that 

 they consider to be stamped by long usage to names that they might 

 admit to be more philosophical. That differences of the kind men- 

 tioned by Sir Henry Howorth should occur in two publications, the 

 one a private production, the other the catalogue of a museum, we 

 take to be unavoidable and natural. On the other hand, were such 

 divergence to occur in the nomenclature adopted in a single volume 

 or in a single museum, unhesitatingly we should assert it to be a fault 

 of the gravest nature. 



His Own Petard. 



The Journal of Botany has taken on itself to criticise a few fairly 

 obvious misprints that lately crept into the Geographical Journal. In 

 his eager anxiety to throw stones, the editor has omitted to test the 

 walls of his own house. In three lines of the very paragraph in which 

 he insists on the wickedness of spelling botanical names incorrectly, 

 " Hemichrysum " is first misquoted as " Hemichysum," then blunderingly 

 corrected to " Helichysum," when all the world knows that it should 

 be " Helichrysum.'" By this time the editor of the Journal of Botany 

 has probably learned that the wiles of the printer are not to be com- 

 bated by the " Assistant-Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, 



