342 Mr. W. Arnold Lewis on 
will always, to the majority, appear unreasonable, to 
require all people, nations, and languages, to give upa 
name on which the world is agreed, for some other no 
one living has before heard of. We have been only 
lately a good deal startled by receiving orders to call our 
Butterflies by names which are very new to us, and if 
our authors had shown a reasonable deference to the 
maxim Communis error facit jus, we might have been 
spared some disagreeables. The mode, however, of 
introducing changes in names—wholly unsatisfactory as 
it is—has effectually prevented any rule of this kind 
being even proposed, as we shall, I think, presently find. 
In last years Transactions, appear some learned papers 
by Mr. Crotch, on the genera of Coleoptera,* showing how 
much confusion there has been in them; and the President 
in his address this year, suggests that it may be necessary 
to take some concerted action with a view to settlement. 
The concerted action will, I think I may prophesy, take 
this form, that all that is will be declared right, and the 
forgotten, if accurate, distinctions will be remitted to the 
oblivion from which they were dragged. It 7s too much 
to be told, as Mr. Dunning remarked was its effect, when 
the paper was read here, that “ all the names by which we 
have been calling our beetles are wrong,” and, when the 
information comes thus in a lump, the change is resisted. 
In principle, there is no difference between that case and 
the case of our Butterflies; everyone has agreed to call 
Linea Linea, and it is too much because some one else 
once called it by a different name, to ask the whole scien- 
tific world to abandon that and call the species Thaumas. 
The mode, however, of introducing changes of names 
(in the English synonymic lists at least) is very unsatis- 
factory, and tells the reader nothing; and it is by no 
means surprising, that the changes themselves are there- 
fore so unacceptable. One reason why they are so, is 
because they are unexplained. Itis no explanation at all 
to scratch out the old name and writein the new one. At 
that rate, any one could make a very startling and real- 
looking list with a Latin dictionary and a list of abbrevi- 
ations. Nor is it any explanation to write in the new 
name, leaving the old name underneath. That only 
shows what the erasure shows just as well—which name 
it is that is superseded. 
* Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond. for 1870, pp. 41, 213. 
