Vo \™ VI ] General Notes. 117 



In ' The Condor,' 1918, p. 92, Dr. Joseph Grinnell takes up the matter 

 and among other things says: " In the spelling of the subspecific name 

 of the American form however, I believe Oberholser to be wrong and 

 erythrogaster should be the proper spelling, not erythrogastris. The term 

 erythrogaster cannot be considered an adjective. It is a Greek noun re- 

 taining its own gender and case when Latinized." 



Dr. W. Stone (Auk, 1918, p. 491) contributes further discussion and 

 says: — "He [i. e. Grinnell] seems to be absolutely right and the action 

 of the original A. O. U. Committee should be upheld." 



The only wonder is that Dr. Oberholser should have disregarded the 

 adopted rules of nomenclature and declared the word to be an adjective. 

 Canon VIII of the A. O. U. Code long ago defined the sort of words that 

 may be used as specific or subspecific names and more recently the Inter- 

 national Rules of Zoological Nomenclature, Article 14, defined them still 

 more explicitly as; (a) adjectives which must agree grammatically with 

 the generic name, (b) substantives in the nominative in apposition with the 

 generic name, and (c) substantives in the genitive. 



Section (b) is applicable to this case for not only Boddaert, who in 1783 

 used Hirundo erythrogaster, but many other early writers on zoology 

 evidently considered the word erythrogaster as a noun Latinized from the 

 Greek after compounding the adjective kpvOpds (erythros, red) with the 

 noun yaarrjp (gaster, the belly). Therefore its ending should remain un- 

 changed no matter whether the genus be masculine, feminine or neuter, 

 and as long as we have nomenclatural rules designed for the purpose of 

 settling such questions, nothing whatever is gained by breaking away 

 from them, and consequently the endings -tra and -tris are quite superfluous 

 attempts to convert a noun into an adjective. 



Unless existing rules are cancelled or considerably modified we are at 

 the mercy of all etymological atrocities and must accept the burden of 

 inconsistencies that confront us at every turn. If an author has obviously 

 constructed a noun we may not turn it into an adjective, however con- 

 venient such procedure might be; and more than this I believe that Latin 

 grammar and the law of priority must necessarily prevail in cases of doubt. 



The converse of this is true and we may not turn an obvious adjective 

 into a noun as Dr. Grinnell would do in the case of Ouiraca cosrulea salicaria 

 (Condor, 1918, p. 92). By no wish of the describer can the good Latin,,' 

 adjectival suffix -arius, convert salicarius (salix, salicis, the willow + -arius 

 belonging to) into a noun! 



The termination -venter should, by analogy, be the ending for all com- 

 pounds of this Latin noun and the endeavors to convert such nouns into 

 non-classical or rather nomenclatural adjectives are responsible for the 

 various endings with which we are troubled. There is now no way of 

 securing uniformity except by a ruling of the International Zoological 

 Commission. 



A great deal more might be said regarding many other nouns and ad- 



