REPOET ON PHILIPPINE HYDROIDA 197 



of the small median hydrothecal tooth. This is so rudimentary that 

 it has not affected the operculum, as in the case of truly tridentate 

 forms such as found in the genus SertulareUa, but his genus Triden- 

 tata has a two-flapped operculum such as is common in Sertularia. 

 This seems to me to be a character not of generic value and I also 

 believe that such a procedure tends to confuse rather than to sim- 

 plify the situation. 



Doctor Stechow is a very thorough and conscientious student of 

 the Hydroida and his activity for the last few years has probably 

 not been surpassed by any other worker in that group ; but his mul- 

 tiplication of names and breaking up of old genera and recombina- 

 tion into new genera of the fragments of the old all tend, in my 

 opinion, to confuse the situation. It is a deplorable fact that the 

 systematists have fallen into more or less disrepute in the estimation 

 of the morphologists and workers in other zoological fields on account 

 of their continual rearrangement and disturbance of classification. 

 This causes constant irritation, indeed exasperation, in the minds of 

 those who are working in the general field, for the simple reason that 

 it seems to them that there is no such thing as stability of names 

 in zoology, although that has really been the aim of the systematists 

 for many years. Doctor Stechow has made an earnest effort to 

 comply with the rules of the International Commission on nomen- 

 clature, but even here he, in common with most European writers, 

 does not adopt the rule that a species named after a person or a 

 country should not be capitalized. 



In his discussion of the Plumularidae, Doctor Stechow again 

 divides the family into three subfamilies, Kirchenpauerinae, Plumu- 

 larinae, and Aglaopheninae, based on the characters of the nemato- 

 phores which are one-chambered in the first, free and two-chambered 

 In the second, and fixed and two-chambered in the third. He recog- 

 nizes a total of 44 genera, of which 12 are new. 



Bedot 2 has undertaken a thorough systematic revision of the 

 family Plumularidae. He does not recognize the subfamilies of 

 Stechow and includes 32 genera in his discussion. He discards the 

 genera Antomma, Dentitheca, Plumella, Osivaldella, Pycnotheca, and 

 Lytocarpia; thus he declines to recognize exactly half of the new 

 genera described by Stechow. This looks almost like a repercussion 

 of the late war. 



The present writer is not prepared to enter fully into this discus- 

 sion, neither is this paper one in which it should figure. He must 

 confess, however, a preference for a conservative course in nomen- 

 clature and is much averse to the abandoning of established genera 

 or the formation of new ones unless such a course is rendered inev- 



* Notes systematiques sur les Plumularides, two parts, 1921. 



