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SUGGESTIONS FOR SECURING SIMPLIFICATION AND 

 PERMANENCY IN NOMENCLATURE. 



By George Wheeler, M.A., F.Z.S., Hon. Sec. E.S. 



As a member of the committee that drew up the resolution to 

 be submitted to this Congress by the Entomological Society of 

 London, it is perhaps unnecessary for me to record my heart}' 

 agreement with that resolution as far as it goes. It was, how- 

 ever, during the deliberations of that Committee that I became 

 more and more deeply impressed with my previous conviction, 

 that so long as the advocates of " Priority at any price " remain 

 masters of the field, any hope of unanimity or of fixit\" of nomen- 

 clature — the goal at which the\' are supposed to aim — is amongst 

 the most impossible of Utopian dreams. The members of that 

 Committee, representing the most widel\' divergent views on 

 the subject, were all nominally in favour of the Law of Priority 

 in some form, but it soon became apparent that almost all had 

 in reserve a list — sometimes rather a long list and always a 

 difíerent one — of exceptions, to which that law ought not, in 

 their opinion, to appl\'. So much for unanimity, and the dream 

 of fixity is as wild ; for at any tim(> a forgotten book, or maga- 

 zine, or pamphlet, may turn up in some out-of-the-way or 

 unexpected corner, to upset not only well-estabhshed and uni- 

 versally accepted names, but the whole s\-stematic work of those 

 who have regarded these names as affording an unchangeable 

 basis. I need only refer in passing to Meigen's paper on Diptera, 

 dated 1800, and only recenth' discovered, which has been so 

 precipitately accepted in some quarters, aj)])arentl\' without 

 any necessity ; but if the advocates of " Priority at an\- ci)>t 

 are to have their way, something almost amounting to a cata- 

 strophe is imj)ending over unlui})py Lci)id<)i)ttrists. for the whole 

 systematic structiue founded on thesu}>positi('nthat the Pai)ili()nid 

 stirps is permancnth- referable to tlu- " Swall()\v-tail> " will fall 

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