NEW BRITISH SPECIES, ETC., IN 1873. 69 



the law of priority in nomenclature upon its present basis, 

 will, I fear, not derive much comfort from the various 

 attempts recently made to regenerate the whole scheme of 

 zoological nomenclature. Thus Harting, in the Archiv fiir 

 Naturgeschichte, vol. xxxvii, p. 24, et seq., has published 

 an elaborate scheme, entitled " Skizze eines rationellen 

 Systems der zoologischen Nomenclatur" (lately analyzed by 

 von Harold in Col. Heft, x, pp. 234 — 240),by which (some- 

 what after the system employed in artificial mnemonics) a 

 series of symbolic syllables is to be used, irrespective of the 

 now recognized meanings of words : e. g. any word ending 

 in ares represents a vertebrate animal ; the prefix of p 

 indicates a mammal; of /, one of the Placentalia; of ar, 

 one of the Rodentia; and of R, one of the Murina, which 

 group thus becomes " jRarZ/jar^^" ! The reductio ad ah- 

 surdiim (according to our now prevalent ideas of nomen- 

 clature) by v. Harold of Geotrupes to " Gescalerderes^'' 

 using the author's own formula, seems to cast a doubt on 

 the propriety of the word " rationellen" used by Harting in 

 his title. But even that generic name is not, perhaps, more 

 objectionable than the nonsense names and anagrams which 

 we are compelled to tolerate. Viewing it as having any 

 meaning, no prior education in those languages, which, being 

 the common possession of every person of culture, whatever 

 his nationality, are rightly employed as the medium for 

 scientific information, could possibly eliminate that attribute: 

 the only way to profit by the scheme would be to learn by 

 rote the various keys to the process, without which, the 

 connection between Alfred the Great and a cucumber frame 

 is not easy to perceive. I quote this apparently irrelevant 

 matter, because I have a dim recollection that {rememheriyig 

 the key) the garden utensil somehovv^ gives the date during 



