choose not to increase the confusion by refusing to adopt them." 

 Among those, indeed, who have been foremost in rejecting such 

 names, few are found to have followed throughout the principle 

 which they have themselves laid down. Thus these very writers 

 have frequently recurred to the names of Brisson and others, who 

 neither used them in the sense in which genera are now under- 

 stood, nor gave characters by which their limits could be deter- 

 mined. What may have been the motive of such inconsistent in- 

 novations, it is not for the writer to conjecture ; but their effect 

 has certainly been (both in cases of rejection and substitution) to 

 attach the names of the innovators to a great number of new com- 

 binations of generic and specific names, which, in strict justice, can 

 only be regarded as synonyms. 



So far has this desire of introducing new names been carried, 

 that many Ornithologists are in the constant habit of changing ge- 

 neric names, even when accompanied by characters, if the slightest 

 modification is made in the circumscription of the group to which 

 they are applied, or even if the characters do not tally with their 

 own idea of sufficiency. Thus, an author will not hesitate to state, 

 that he cannot adopt the genera of certain Ornithologists, because 

 they are not what he is disposed to consider " natural divisions;" he 

 therefore proposes his own divisions, and designates them by his 

 own names. But it is curious in such cases to compare the " natu- 

 ral" with the "unnatural" divisions; and to observe, in the great 

 majority of instances, how nearly they coincide with each other. 

 The inutility, or worse, of coining new generic names in such 

 cases is obvious to all except the coiner himself, who may perhaps 

 fancy that he is increasing the stock of knowledge, while he is only 

 overloading the memory with synonymous terms. Such uncalled 

 for changes must necessarily prove detrimental to the progress of 

 science, the advancement of which is supposed to be aimed at by 

 every systematist, although too many of them are apt to forget 

 this true end, and to think only of the means of elevating them- 

 selves at the expense of their predecessors and of the unhappy 

 student, who becomes bewildered in the choice among so many 

 different systems, each carefully shrouded in the veil of its own no- 

 menclature. 



