Taverner — On Priority. 12s 



PRIORITY. 



BY P. A. TAVERXER. 



We live in hopes, in fact we have lived in hopes for these 

 many years past, that, some day all the precedents will have 

 been exhausted and we will have achieved that milleninm when 

 onr nomenclature will he stable, when we can write a Latin 

 name with some reasonable hope that the student who delves 

 not in archeologieal terminology will be able to understand 

 what species we are speaking about. 



Theoretically, the supply of precedents cannot be inexhaus- 

 tible ; we therefore hail each, and every change with the com- 

 forting thought: ''One name nearer the end." 



There comes a time, however, when patience ceases to be ; 

 virtue. When we see old idols, the friends of our childhood, 

 ruthlessly dashed to the ground — when old Corvus america- 

 nus is relegated to the dust heap of synonomy after years of 

 fond association, when Bubo is threatened with like extinc- 

 tion,— then we wonder what this sacred thing Priority is. 

 Whether nomenclature is really a "Means to an end" as Prin- 

 ciple I say, or whether it exists for the glory of dead, long- 

 forgotten ornithologists — often of questionable attainments — 

 who, by a streak of luck, happened to tack the first name upon 

 a bird of which lie, perhaps, saw merely a fragment, and knew 

 as little of its place in the living world as we do of mushrooms 

 on Mars. 



The scientific nomenclature exists avowedly for stability 

 alone. Let him who doubts this peruse the lists of synonomy 

 that adorn our manuals. It is amusing then to turn to the 

 vernacular names which have no scientific standing, and are 

 subject to every whim of the passing speaker and scribbler. 

 It seems like a travesty upon our system of taxonomy that 

 the vulgar names that are discarded by mature scientists as 

 too evanesent for recognition have proved stable in so high a 

 degree, while the stem of Latin and Greek derivatives chosen 



