^"Is'^^^l Corresponde?ice. 429 



that is, that it is in some way an aid to those who have to deal with the 

 enormously complicated and ever growing mass of binomial nomen- 

 clature. Such an aid the citation of authority undoubtedly is, but under 

 one condition only — when it furnishes a clue to that cardinal event in 

 the histor}' of the name to which it is attached, its first published intro- 

 duction to the scientific world. When the name of the authority cited 

 fails to give this clue it is not only a useless encumbrance to memory, 

 but also an actual addition to the inconveniences of our system of nomen- 

 clature. And this is the inevitable result of quoting the name of the 

 writer of the nomen nudum instead of the publisher. To take a case in 

 point : A few years ago Dr. J. A. Allen published a revision of a certain 

 group of American chipmunks. Among the forms which he then for the 

 first time described was one that Mr. C. H. Townsend had collected in 

 Lower California and immediately recognized as new. On the labels of 

 the specimens Mr. Townsend had written the specific name obscurus. 

 This Dr. Allen adopted, and gave for authority 'Townsend MS.,' though 

 the description and publication on which the name rests were wholly by 

 himself. Suppose now that in a subsequent paper the name is mentioned 

 as ' Tamias obscurus Townsend,' a person not familiar with the triviah 

 so to speak, prenatal incidents of nomenclatural history — and no specialist 

 can keep them all in mind — will waste time and patience in searching 

 through Mr. Townsend's bibliography for a paper in which a chipmunk 

 might have received a new name. When, after abandoning the false clue 

 furnished by the citation he proceeds as he would have done in the first 

 place had no authority been mentioned, and at length finds the original 

 description in a paper by Dr. Allen, he may or may not feel repaid for 

 his trouble by the discovery of the vaguely conveyed information that 

 Mr. Townsend knew something about the animal before Dr. Allen named 

 it. The citation ' Tamias obscurus Allen,' on the other hand, leads 

 unequivocally to the series of papers in which the name first appeared, 

 and therefore very materially assists in tracing out its history. 



While the tendency to quote the writer of a manuscript name as author- 

 ity for the published term probably originated from the prevalent con- 

 fusion of the authority for a name with the authority for a species or 

 group, in reality no two things could be more unrelated than these, and 

 as already stated it is with the first and the first only that nomenclature 

 has to deal. A moment's reflection will show the truth of this assertion- 

 No one regards Linnaeus, for instance, as authority for the specific discrim- 

 ination of the many American birds whose systematic names are followed 

 by the abbreviation ' Linn.' He simply took the species described under 

 poh'nomial names by other authors and applied to them binomial desig- 

 nations. Similarlv when a species is originally described under an unten- 

 able binomial, and the mistake is corrected by a subsequent author, the 

 latter alone stands as authority for the name, although he did not discover 

 the species or introduce it to zoology or botany. A well known instance 

 is furnished by the name Calamospiza melanocorys Stejneger. The bird 



