78 GENERAL ORNITHOLOGY. 



among English -speakiug naturalists. Their sequence is fixed, as above, from higher to lower, 

 in relative rank.^ With the exceptions to be presently noted, the names of any groups are 

 arbitrary, at the will of the person who founds and designates them. The framer of a genus, 

 or the describer of a species, calls it what he pleases, and the name he gives holds, subject to 

 certain statutory regulations which naturalists generally agree to abide by. The exceptions 

 are the names of families and subfamilies, the former commonly being made to end in -idcB, the 

 latter in -incB : family Turdidce ; subfamily Turdince. This is a great convenience, since we 

 always know the rank intended to be noted by these forms. The names of groups higher than 

 species are almost invariably single words ; as, order Passeres ; but sometimes, especially in 

 cases of interinediate groups, two words are used, one qualifying the other ; as, suborder 

 Passeres Acromyodi, or Oscine Passeres. A generic or subgeneric name is always a single 

 word; these, and the names of all higher groups, invariably begin with a capital letter. 



Until quite recently, the scientific name of any individual bird almost invariably consisted 

 of two terms, generic and specific — the name of the genus, followed by the name of the 

 species; as, Merula migratoria, for the Robin. This is the "binomial nomenclature"' (badly 

 so called, for "binominal'' would be better), introduced by Linnseus in the middle of the last 

 century. It was a great improvement upon the former method of giving either single arbitrary 

 names to birds, often a mere Latin translation of their vernacular nickname, or long descriptive 

 names of several words; probably no other single improvement in a method of nt)menclature 

 ever did so much to make the technique of nomenclature systematic. To couple the two terms 

 at all was a great thing, the convenience of which we who never felt its want can hardly appre- 

 ciate. To follow the generic by the specific term was itself of the same advantage that it is to 

 have the Smiths and Browns of a directory entered under S and B, instead of by Johns and 

 Jameses; besides according with the genius of the Romance languages, which commonly put 

 the adjective after the noun. A Frenchman, for example, would say, Bec-croise aux ailes 

 blanches de VAmerique septentrionale, or " Bill-crossed to the wings white of the America 

 north," where we should say, "North American White-winged Cross-bill," and Linnaeus 

 would have written Loxia leucoptera. The binomial scheme worked so well that it came to 

 have the authority and force of a statute, which few subsequent naturalists have been inclined, 

 and fewer have ventured, to violate ; while it became an ex post facto law to prior naturalists, 

 ruling them out of court altogether, as far as the legitimacy of any of the names they had be- 

 stowed was concerned. It necessarily rested, however, or at any rate proceeded upon, the false 

 idea of a species as a fixity. Linnseus himself experienced the inadequacy of his system to 

 deal binomially with those lesser groups than species, commonly called " varieties," now better 

 designated as "conspecies" or "subspecies"; and he often used a third word, separated how- 

 ever from the binomial name by intervention of the sign " var." or some other symbol. Thus, 

 if he had supposed an American Crossbill to be a variety of a European Loxia leucoptera, he 

 might have called it Loxia leucoptera, a, americana. Many years ago I urged the necessity of 

 recognizing by name a great number of forms of our birds intermediate between nominal species, 

 and connected by links so perfect, that our handling of " species" required thorough reconsid- 

 eration. The dilemma arose, through our very intimate knowledge of the climatic and geo- 

 graphical variation of " species," either to discard a great number that had been described, and 

 so ignore all the ultimate modifications of our bird-forms; or else to recognize as good species 

 the same large number of forms that we knew shaded into each so completely that no specific 

 character could be assigned. In the original edition of the present work (1872), I compromised 

 the matter by reducing to the rank of varieties the nominal species that were known or believed 



1 The expression " higher group," in the sense of relative rank in the taxonomic scale, will of course be dis- 

 tinguished from the same expression when applied to the relative rank in the scale of organization of the objects 

 classified. Au order of birds is a " higher group " than a family of birds, in the former sense, but no higher than 

 an order of worms, in the latter sense 



