BuLLEB. — On New Zealand Ornithology. 335 



if I may be allowed to speak plainly, the nomenclature 

 adopted is not up to date, some of the names attached to 

 specimens having been obsolete these twenty years, whilst 

 fully half of those exhibited are not named at all. If the 

 Museum is to be regarded as an educational institution, as it 

 clearly should be, an antiquated nomenclature is not only 

 confusing but misleading. 



And li£re I may say, parenthetically, that there is one in- 

 novation in the matter of scientific nomenclature, now be- 

 coming very popular, which will, I hope, be resisted in this 

 country, and that is the use of trinomials. In Eidgway's 

 " List of North American Birds" trinomial designations are 

 adopted in no less than 160 cases. The author candidly 

 acknowledges that the use of them has caused perhaps the 

 greatest difficulty encountered in the compilation of the cata- 

 logue, " it being in many cases very difficult to decide whether 

 a given form should be treated as having passed the varietal 

 stage and therefore to be designated by a binomial, or whether it 

 is as yet incompletely differentiated and to be subordinated in 

 rank by a trinomial appellation." His contention, however, 

 is that every form whose characteristics bear unmistakably 

 the impress of climatic or local influences, generally less 

 marked towards the habitat of another form with which it 

 thus intergrades, and all forms which certainly intergrade, no 

 matter how widely distinct the opposite forms may appear, 

 together with intergrading forms whose peculiarities are not 

 explained by any known law of variation, should be reduced to 

 subspecific rank. Commenting on this, the editor of the 

 Ibis writes, " We cannot deny the advantages of the use of 

 trinomials when strictly limited to such cases as these, and 

 have little doubt that they will ultimately come into general 

 use. But they can only be advantageously employed in 

 countries such as North America and Europe, where large 

 series can be obtained from different localities. In other 

 parts of the world their use would at present be attended 

 by much inconvenience, it being impossible to ascertain in 

 very many cases, from lack of specimens, whether these 

 intergradations exist or not. We may also remark that 

 other authors use trinomials on quite different principles — 

 e.g., Dr. Sharpe, who in his Catalogue of Birds (British 

 Museum) has applied them in some instances even to insular 

 forms (which certainly cannot intergrade) where the slight 

 differences are, in his opinion, not strictly sufficient for specific 

 distinction." 



I submit that what I have now called attention to as 

 defects in the Colonial Museum might be easily remedied ; 

 and that the value of the Museum as an instrument of public 

 instruction would be vastly increased if the Director could 



