292 NATURAL SCIENCE. May, 



" In selecting the name chosen I have been mainly guided by the 

 views which have been gradually gaining general currency among 

 conscientious naturalists of all nations, and which were formulated in 

 what is commonly called the ' Stricklandian Code,' adopted by a 

 committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 

 in 1842, and revised and reprinted by the Association in 1865 and 

 again in 1878. These are nearly the same in principle as those con- 

 cisely and clearly laid down by Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in the 

 introduction to his unfinished Catalogue of the Mammalia in the 

 'Museum d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris' (1851), and those so 

 copiously elaborated in Mr. Dall's Report of the Committee on 

 Zoological Nomenclature to the American Association for the 

 Advancement of Science at the Nashville meeting in 1877. The 

 regulations laid down in these codes for the formation of new names 

 are unimpeachable ; and although some of the rules for the selection 

 of names already in existence have given rise to criticism, and are 

 occasionally difficult of practical application when an endeavour is 

 made to enforce them rigidly, they do in the main, when interpreted 

 with discretion and common sense, lead to satisfactory results. As 

 what we are aiming at is simply convenience and general accord, and 

 not abstract justice or truth, there are cases in which the rigid law of 

 priority, even if it can be ascertained, requires qualification, as it is 

 certainly not advisable to revive an obsolete or almost unknown name 

 at the expense of one which, if not strictly legitimate, has been 

 universally accepted and become thoroughly incorporated in 

 zoological and anatomical literature ; and it is often better to put up 

 with a small error or inconvenience in an existing name than to incur 

 the much larger confusion caused by the introduction of a new one. 



" Of all the various groups into which animals are conventionally 

 divided by zoologists, such as classes, orders, families, genera, 

 species, etc., the last two are of greater importance than any of the 

 others, as upon the limits assigned to them the name of the animal 

 depends. It matters comparatively little how we arrange and 

 rearrange orders and suborders, families and subfamilies in our 

 endeavours to express our views of the affinities of their members to 

 each other ; but directly we apply the same process to genera and 

 species we begin to introduce that greatest source of trouble and 

 perplexity to students, and most fertile source of impediment to the 

 progress of zoological knowledge, the multiplication of names of the 

 same object. All zoologists seem to be agreed as to the value of the 

 system introduced by Linnaeus, by which the name of the animal is 

 determined by the genus and species under which it is placed, and all 

 attempts to improve and modify this method of nomenclature have 

 ended in failure. It might have been supposed that this general 

 agreement would have preserved these groups, especially the former, 

 from the inconsiderate, hasty, and useless alterations to which they 

 have been incessantly subjected by zoologists who have often con- 

 tributed nothing else to the development of their science. I do not 

 mean that with the advancement of knowledge improvements cannot 

 be continually made in the current arrangement of genera. The older 

 groups become so unwieldy by the discovery of new species belonging 

 to them that they must be broken up, if only for the sake of convenience ; 

 newly discovered forms which cannot be placed in any of the established 

 genera must have new genera constituted for them, and fuller know- 

 ledge of the structure of an animal may necessitate its removal from 

 one genus into another : all these are incidents in the legitimate 

 progress of science. Such alterations, however, should never be 



