Recent Literature. 169 



forms as were not known to intergrade, he says : " To our mind, this 

 forcibly illustrates the inefficiency of the Linnaean nomenclature as an 

 adequate method of formulating our knowledge. Tt answered when a 

 thing was either square or else it was round, — when species were held for 

 fixed facts as separate creations ; but now that we know a thing may 

 be neither square nor round, but something between, it is lamentably 

 defective. Not many years hence we trust naturalists will have discarded 

 it for some better method of notation : and then the wonder will be that 

 we advanced so far with such a stumbling-block in the way. Who shall 

 say how much the advance of chemistry, for instance, or of philosophic 

 anatomy, has been facilitated, or indeed rendered possible, by the inven- 

 tion of expressive symbols and apt formulas, or how much of the acknowl- 

 edged confusion in zoology and botany flows from our cramped method of 

 expressing our views ? If we must continue to use a tool so blunt and un- 

 hands as the binomial nomenclature, all cannot be expected to use it with 

 equal skill and effect." In the same connection, in referring to the im- 

 portance of '• recognizing geographical and some other differentiations by 

 name," he adds, " Not necessarily a specific name, but some one addi- 

 tional word, with or without the sign ' var.,' that shall stamp the form we 

 wish to signalize. Perhaps this would be a judicious middle course, most 

 applicable to the present state of the science. " * In less than a year 

 from this time a trinomial system was adopted, with the compromise of 

 the sign " var." interposed between the specific and varietal names, by 

 the three writers above named, by at least one of whom the necessity of 

 such a procedure was formally argued. But even much earlier than this 

 "varieties" had more or less frequently been recognized by writers on 

 American birds, even in the sense of geographical forms (notably by 

 Professor Baird, 1858 to 1866) but probably not in the sense of incipient 

 species, in which they were now avowedly recognized. From this date 

 (1872) the practice became general, as is witnessed by almost every work or 

 faunal list relating to the birds of the western half of the continent that 

 has since appeared. In 1876, in referring to the changes in the nomen- 

 clature of North American ornithology that had marked the few years 

 immediately preceding that date, the present writer thus referred to the 

 subject of trinomials : " The next step, and apparently a whollv logical 

 one in the revolution, will doubtless be the general adoption of a tri- 

 nomial system of nomenclature for the more convenient expression of 

 the relationship of what are conventionally termed ' subspecies,' so that 

 we may write, for instance, Falco communis anatum in place of the more 

 cumbersome Falco communis subsp. anatum. This system is already, in 

 fact, to some extent in use here, though looked upon with strong disfavor 

 by our Transatlantic fellow-workers, who seem as yet not fully to under- 

 stand* the nature of the recent rapid advance ornithology has made in 



* Amer. Nat., Vol. V, p. 373, and foot-note to p. 371. 



