V0l .8* 9 VI ] Gill, Pedioccetes and Pooccetes. 21 



True, if the assumption were true ! but ttcSiov and koitt^s could 

 be compounded into Pediocwtes and the resultant would be a word 

 abundantly sanctioned by classical usage. Put in italics, the dif- 

 ference between Pedioccetes and Pedioccetes is small indeed, and as- 

 Baird may never have seen the pattern name otherwise than in 

 italics, it is no wonder that at first sight he might have mistaken 

 the w for ce and carried over his impressions into other fields. 



II. 



Baird unquestionably modelled the names Pediocaetes and 

 Poocaetes after Ammocaetes. He suffered from obliquity of vision 

 or mind respecting the last name and rendered it Ammoccetes in- 

 stead of Ammoccetes : the name was so spelled in the ' Icono- 

 graphic Cyclopaedia' (II, 207, 208, 185 1). He later (1854) based 

 a generic name for a true frog {Helocaetes) on the same model. 

 Finally (1858) he coined the bird names Nephocaetes, Poocaetes and 

 Pediocaetes after the same patterns. Baird was not acquainted 

 with Greek, and when he was informed that the bird names 

 should have been written Nep/ioecetes, Pooecetes, and Pedioecetes, he 

 not unnaturally assumed that his critic was correct and altered 

 the names correspondingly in the table of contents. But his 

 critic was not correct, and was probably ignorant of the model 

 Baird had used. That model was justified by a number of 

 ancient Greek names. Two of the best known names of ichthy- 

 ology were classical Greek names used for genera which are the 

 types of distinct families — Exocoetus and Hemerocoetes : Exo- 

 coetus, misapplied by Linnaeus to the flying fishes, appears in the 

 works of Theophrastus, Aelianus and Oppianus, and was a com- 

 ponent of e£w and kolttj — a fish sleeping out of the water; 

 Hemerocoetes, misapplied by Cuvier and Valenciennes, to a New 

 Zealand genus of fishes, occurs as the name of an undetermined 

 fish in Oppian, and was a compound of rjfjajpa, day and kolttj. 

 Another well-known zoological name is that of a genus of Cystig- 

 nathoid batrachians — Borborocoetes : this was literally reproduced 

 from a designation in the ' Batrachomyomachia ' translated in Lid- 

 dell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon as " mudcoucher." Still 

 further, by a notable coincidence the name Pediocaetes is closely 



