thereby caused a great deal of confusion, with a resulting crop 

 of synonyms ranging in some cases up to 75 percent of their 

 descriptions. One author dealing with sawflies redescribedthe 

 same species eighteen times. As one of my colleagues remarked 

 regarding the description of some new species of fossils by a 

 certain palaeontologist, "a paper m.ight be written entitled 

 The Origin of Species, with apologies to Darwin." 



In most of the groups in which the nomenclatorial system 

 has been revised from the new standpoint the change has pro- 

 ceeded without undue disturbance by placing large numbers 

 of trivial names in the synonymy, and reducing others to the 

 status of subspecies; but in the case of highly variable poly- 

 typic forms the difficulty of harmonizing the traditional sys- 

 tematics and the modern viewpoint has been very great. No 

 satisfactory method has as yet been devised to give taxonomic 

 expression to the kaleidoscopic clinal phenomena exhibited by 

 populations and by series of local races of the ''rasseyikreise'' 

 type. Dr. H. A. Pilsbry (1912) has expressed this situation in 

 very apt language in his monograph of the Hawaiian tree- 

 snails where he remarks, " A philosophic method of dealing 

 with intraspecific differentiation is one of the greatest present 

 needs of systematic zoology." Similar difficulties have been 

 encountered by students of insects and other groups of ani- 

 mals in attempting to harmonize systematics as a descriptive 

 science and the dynamic viewpoint of the animal world as an 

 evolving system. In plants we find similar problems, as is illus- 

 trated by the case of the tarweeds investigated by Babcock 

 and Hall (1924). These authors in a study of a group of plants 

 included in the genus Hemizonia were enabled by supplemen- 

 ting the usual herbarium and field examinations with detailed 

 genetic and ecological experiments, to prove conclusively that 

 all nine names previously assigned to this group must be re- 

 garded as variants of Hemizonia congesta described in 1836 

 by the botanist DeCandolle. 



