368 Bibliographical Notices. 



the soil ; weeds which, though they may be rooted out of the syste- 

 matic arrangement, must yet, in the shape of synonyms, continue 

 for ever to choke up the writings and load the memories of ornitho- 

 logists, throwing a dusky veil of human mystification over the fair 

 face of Nature. Does not this fact prove the necessity of naturalists 

 agreeing upon some general rules and principles to be followed in 

 constructing their nomenclatures ? It is not, I think, asserting too 

 much to say, that if ornithologists had had a good code of laws for 

 their guidance, and had not in many cases yielded to personal vanity 

 or to an indolent neglect of the labours of their predecessors, nearly 

 the whole of these 842 useless generic names might have been spared 

 to the science, and would have been available in other departments 

 of zoology, from which they are now for ever excluded. Mr. Gray's 

 work, if diffused as widely as it deserves to be, will, it may be hoped, 

 go far in checking the daily growing evil of multiplying words with- 

 out multiplying facts ; and we may hope that this work will have 

 many imitators in other branches of natural history, some of which 

 are even in a more chaotic state than ornithology. 



The principle of priority which Mr. Gray has followed in select- 

 ing his nomenclature is now daily gaining ground among judicious 

 naturalists, but there are one or two points in which I think he has 

 carried his principle too far, on which I now proceed to remark. 



In his former edition, Mr. Gray extends the law of priority (with 

 a few exceptions) no further back than 1760, the date of Brisson's 

 work, but in the present edition he gives the benefit of this law to 

 Mcehring's * Genera Avium,' published in 1752, and to the first edi- 

 tion of Linnaeus' ' Systema Naturae,' in 1735. Now if this arrange- 

 ment had worked well there would have been no good ground of ob- 

 jection to it, but it happens unfortunately that these two works 

 have lain almost dormant from the time of their publication till 

 1841, when Mr. Gray has drawn them from their dusty shelves. In 

 the mean time, many of the generic names found in these old works 

 have been used in totally different senses by later authors, and have 

 been now current for thirty or forty years. To these later genera 

 Mr. Gray gives new names, and restores their former names to the 

 old genera of Mcehring and of Linnaeus's first edition, from which 

 they have been so long removed. For instance, he follows Mcehring 

 in giving the generic name Spj.nus to the common Bunting, Trago- 

 pan to a Hornbill, Scops to the Demoiselle Crane, Cinclus to the 

 Turnstone, Catarrhactes to the Guillemot, So, after Linnaeus's first 

 edition, he applies the name Grus to the Balearic Crane, Numenius 

 to the Snipes, and Graucalus to the Cormorants. The ornithologist 

 will immediately remark that these names have long been applied to 

 genera widely different from those here mentioned, genera upon which 

 Mr. Gray is obliged to impose fresh names, either selected from later 

 authors or new -coined for the occasion. He gives, for instance, 

 the new name Megalornis to the common Crane, and Cracticornis to 

 the Curlew. 



These alterations of names so long established are not merely in- 

 convenient, but it is to be feared that they will fail of their desired 

 effect, that of producing uniformity of nomenclature. We cannot, 



