18 EMYDOSAURIAN AND TESTUDINIAN REPTILES 
against those authors who honourably adhere to the rule of 
priority, the justice of which no committee of scientists has 
ever yet ventured to impugn. They are accused of causing 
confusion, if, not only in the exercise of their legal right (as 
laid down in every code of zodlogical nomenclature), but 
actually in the performance of their bounden duty, they 
substitute for a name which has been long but erroneously 
employed a much older but less widely known title. At once 
from those whose memories are not sufficiently strong to “* ring 
out the false, ring in the true,” there comes, from the flurried 
dovecotes of sentimentalism, the rallying cry of “‘ confusion,” 
because we refuse, at the entreaty of a school, which fortunately 
is daily growing smaller in numbers and feebler in authority, 
to favour the retention of aname which has no claim to existence. 
But such cases of substitution, which have the imprimatur 
of the highest authority, are few in number in comparison 
with the hundreds of names, the orthography of which is 
annually altered to suit the caprice of irresponsible individuals, 
on whom, therefore, tenfold les the onus of accentuating 
the well-nigh irreparable confusion into which modern 
nomenclature has drifted. 
All such changes, being manifestly illegal, should be sternly 
deprecated, and, even though already effected, unhesitatingly 
ignored. If this be permitted in one case, what law is in 
existence capable of preventing the next author who deals 
with the same subject dissenting from the orthographic altera- 
tion of the preceding writer and substituting a new reading 
of his own, and so on, and so on, until we have the original 
spelling multiplied again and again, and the unfortunate 
student of the future finds himself groping blindly and dizzily 
in a veritable orthographical maze. 
I am not here defending the orthography of the older 
biologists, which was often erroneous, occasionally eccentric ; 
still, since there was at that time no law against forming a 
name, according, for instance, to the spelling of the Greek 
words from which it was derived, no subsequent author is 
justified in changing the original name, nor can any of our 
recent laws of zodlogical nomenclature confer such a right. 
As a case in point let us take Kinosternon. This name 
was transcribed with absolute accuracy from the Greek 
characters, and in that form was accepted by such noted 
