272 ON ]ME. ALLAN HUME'S EEVIEW OF [1S74. 



nations mit^ht and do agree to employ Latin as a common medium of thought-exchange, it is 

 most improbable that they would consent to forego using their own language and to adopt that 

 of some rival nation. The Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Russians, Dutch, Hungarians, Poles, 

 Czechs, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians have all produced and are producing naturalists. 

 Why are they to be condemned to write in English, French, or German ] Would Mr. Hume 

 consider it fair, when desirous of making known the discovery oi a BissemMroides dicruriformis * (!), 

 to be restricted to the use of the Czech, Russian, or Hungarian tongues ? Is not Latin also 

 that language in which descriptions can be rendered with the greatest precision and conciseness % 

 M. Severtzoff's recent work, ' Turkestanskie Sevotnie,' is a case in point. It contains descriptions 

 of many new species, and is entirely in Russian. It might be argued that M. Severtzoff should 

 have written in English, French, or German. But perhaps M. SevertzoflF may think that " 100 

 years hence " Russian will be spoken by " 500 millions of people " rather than English. Mr. 

 Hume's proposal carries its own refutation. 



Knowledge of the past and current literature implied, in natural history, by the term 

 ' synonymy ' meets with as little favour from Mr. Hume as every other branch of knowledge in 

 which he is not a proficient. It is even doubtful, judging from his remarks, whether the meaning 

 involved in the term is not somewhat beyond his grasp. A good synonymist, among other things, 

 knows every description of a species, or, in other words, every species that has been described, 

 and consequently the correct geographical range of each species. His statements of facts are 

 therefore more likely to be accurate than those of the illiterate writer. If Mr. Hume were a 

 synonymist he would have spared us many stale facts under the name of " novelties." Nor would 

 he, for example, have recorded [op. cit. i. p. 378. no. 452) that a bird whose range is restricted 

 Ibis, 1874, to South China, Ixus chrysorrhoides, Lafr., occurs in the centre of India. If the author of the 

 ^' '°' excellent paper f in which this appears {t. c.) had only been allowed to follow Jerdon this 

 blunder would have been avoided. 



All through the Review there runs an endeavour to resuscitate fallacies, long since refuted 

 and buried in Europe, concerning the superiority of one class of naturalists over another. Mr. 

 Hume has noticed " a tendency on the part of the compilers of other men's observations to exalt 

 themselves above the observers," etc. {t. c. p. 26), and a great deal more in the same imaginative 

 strain, the outcome of but groundless though honest delusions. Can any one of my readers find 

 among the past or daily writings of European naturalists a parallel to the exalted and vaniloquent 

 self-assertion of this " humble student of many branches of Natural History " {t. c. p. 26) % 

 Some stray sentiments contained in the cimcluding paragraphs of his Review are, though devoid 

 of novelty, unimpeachable. But from the general drift of Mr. Hume's criticisms it is to be 

 gathered that the men whose position, by choice or accident, enables them to live for a period of 

 years in a country where certain animals are indigenous, and who, by means of their native 

 collectors or by their own hands, are able to convert them into specimens from " the flesh," are 

 immeasurably superior to the man who endeavours to evolve order out of chaos, and to marshal 

 the disconnected often ill-digested and sometimes erroneous observations made by them. It is 



* Hume, Str. Feath. i. p. 408. 



t R. il. Adam, " Notes on the Birds of the Sambhwr Lake." 



