99 



îs some credit accruing to the author of a name from the fact 

 that he has given it. That there is a responsibiUt\' attached to 

 the action may be readily admitted, but so far from its bt-ing 

 necessarily creditable, a name may mereh' stand as a monument 

 of an author's ignorance, or conceit, or stupidit}', or again, with- 

 out being actually discreditable, of his harmless eccentricity 

 only. It has been cynicalh- remarked that " an}- fool can give 

 a name." Quite so, but \vh\' should thos(> who are not fools be 

 compelled to accept it ? 



Still, it is, I suppose, universally admitted that Priority 

 must be the foundation-stone of nomenclature, as well as of 

 classification, which is not neccssarih' the same thing ; and the 

 \\T,de differences of oj^inion that exist are concerned, not with 

 this foundation, but with the question of what exceptions, if 

 any, should be admitted; and it is only against "Priority at 

 any price," not against Priorit\' as a general ])rinciple, that I 

 wish to contend. There is probably no one who would not 

 assent to the Law of Priority in the sense that the oldest avail- 

 able name of a species, variety, etc., is the correct name : the 

 whole question at issue turns on the definition of the two words 

 "name" and "available," for not every pronounceable com- 

 bination of letters is a " name," nor should every name, not pre- 

 occupied, be regarded as " available." To this point I shall 

 shortly recur. 



I observed that nomenclature is not necessarih' the same 

 thing as classification, but this is strictly true of one form of 

 nomenclature only — in my opinion the ideal form — that is, of a 

 uninomial nomenclature'. Everybody, according to the language 

 he speaks, understands what you mean when you talk of the 

 " Red Admiral," or the "Trauermantel," or the " Paon du jour," 

 and these names are all uninomial, though thry consist of one, 

 two, and thrcr w(»rds respectiveh' ; ]:>ut in tlu- absence of a uni- 

 versally accepted language this ideal seems hopeless of realisa- 

 tion. It need not have been so. if the same Latin name had 

 never been regarded as availabh^ for more than onr species, for 

 then the word would have designated that one thing, and, 

 zoologically sjx-aking, would have mi'ant nothing else, and would 

 therefore have been an ideal name, the chief reason for giving a 

 name at all being that the object named may be recognisable 



