26o NATURAL SCIENCE. April, 1896. 



every man credited with his own work, and not some other man. 

 The law of priority in nomenclature goes no further in this direction 

 than the nature of each case requires. Nomenclature may be an 

 index of much meritorious work, or it may represent comparatively 

 little work ; but it is to the interest of all of us that it be not used to 

 sustain a false pretence of work that has not been done at all. By 

 insisting on this essential test of honest intentions we retain the taxo- 

 nomic and phylogenetic work within the circle of a class of men who 

 are competent to it, and cease to hold out rewards to picture-makers 

 and cataloguers. 



" Another contention of some of the nomenclators who use 

 systematic names proposed without description, is, that the spelling 

 in which they were first printed must not be corrected if they contain 

 orthographical and typographical errors. That this view should be 

 sustained by men who have not had the advantage of a classical 

 education, might not be surprising, although one would think they 

 would prefer to avoid publicly displaying the fact, and would be 

 willing to travel some distance in order to find some person who 

 could help them in the matter of spelling. But when well educated 

 men support such a doctrine, one feels that they have created out of 

 the law of priority a fetish which they worship with a devotion quite 

 too narrow. The form of our nomenclature being Latin, the rules of 

 Latin orthography and grammar are as incumbent on us to observe, 

 as are the corresponding rules of English grammar in our ordinary 

 speech. This cult, so far as I know, exists only in the United States 

 and among certain members of the American Ornithologists Union. 

 The preservation of names which their authors never defined ; of 

 names which their proposers misspelled ; of names from the Greek in 

 Greek instead of Latin form ; of English hyphens in Latin composi- 

 tion ; and of hybrid combinations of Greek and Latin, are objects 

 hardly worth contending for. Some few authors are quite indepen- 

 dent of rules in the use of gender terminations, but I notice the 

 A. O. U. requires these to be printed correctly. Apart from this, I 

 notice in the second edition of their check list of North American 

 Birds just issued, only eighteen misspellings out of a total number of 

 768 specific and subspecific names, and the generic and other names 

 accompanying. These are, of course, not due to ignorance on the 

 part of the members of this body, some of whom are distinguished 

 for scholarship, but because of an extreme view of the law of 

 priority. 



" In closing, I wish to utter a plea for euphony and brevity in 

 the construction of names. In some quarters the making of such 

 names is an unknown art. The simple and appropriate names of 

 Linneus and Cuvier can be still duplicated if students would look 

 into the matter, A great number of such names can be devised by 

 the use of significant Greek prefixes attached to substantiatives which 

 may or may not have been often used. Personal names in Greek 

 have much significance, and they are generally short and euphonious. 

 The unappropriated wealth in this direction is so great that there is 

 really no necessity for poverty in this direction. It should be rarely 

 necessary, for instance, to construct generic names by adding prefixes 

 and suffixes of no meaning to a standard generic name already in 

 use. E. D. Cope." 



