194 THE SCOTTISH NATURALIST 



and rules to the 1842 meeting of the Association {Brit. Assn. 

 Report, 1842, pp. 1 05-121). 



These rules became the recognised authority on the 

 subject. They were submitted in Italian by Prince C. L. 

 Bonaparte, to the Science Congress at Padua in 1843, an d 

 were generally approved of; and a French translation of 

 them appeared in L'lnstitute, in which much stress was 

 laid on their importance. 



In 1863 the Association considered it desirable that this 

 important subject should be further considered, and appointed 

 a committee to report " on the changes which they may 

 consider it desirable to make, if any, in the rules of nomen- 

 clature drawn up at the instance of the British Association 

 in 1842." Its members were Sir Wm. Jardine, Dr P. L. 

 Sclater, H. T. Stainton, Alfred Russel Wallace, Spence Bate, 

 Gwyn Jeffreys, Dr J. E. Gray, Dr P. H. Carpenter, Prof. 

 Newton, Prof. Babington, Dr J. D. Hooker, Prof. Huxley, 

 Dr Francis, Prof. Balfour, Prof. Allman, A. H. Haliday, 

 T. V. Wollaston, and G. Bentham. This committee presented 

 its report in 1865 {Brit. Assn. Report, 1865, pp. 25-42). 



Both these committees recommended that the twelfth 

 edition of Linnaeus' Sy sterna Nature? — the finished work of the 

 great naturalist — should be the foundation upon which zoo- 

 logical nomenclature should be based. The 1865 report con- 

 tained many sound recommendations, one of them being, that 

 it was exceedingly injudicious to accept a specific name for 

 a genus ; and that where such had been done it is the 

 generic name that should be thrown aside, and not the old 

 specific name. 



In 1878 the Association requested Dr P. L. Sclater to 

 re-edit the rules. 



With these well-known facts on record, one reads with 

 amazement the statement on page vi of the introduction 

 of the Hand-List that " we have neglected for more than 

 150 years one of the requisites of greatest importance — that 

 our labels should everywhere be the same for the same bird." 



That the leading principles so carefully propounded by 

 men so pre-eminently distinguished in all branches of 

 zoology should have been set aside after long years of usage, 



