336 Letters, Extracts, and Notes. [Ibis, 



are unaccompanied (as is generally the case) by any infor- 

 mation concerning the haunts, habits, nesting, etc., o£ the 

 newly-named " forms/^ 



To insist upon the acceptance of such views as I condemn 

 is to knock all the life out of the study of ornithology, and 

 to enconrage a younger generation to pay more attention to 

 rule and compass than to the more fascinating and more 

 useful study of the living birds and their geographical 

 distribution. 



(4) I object further to the bestowal of new names on 

 old and well-known species on the pretext of their being 

 '' British forms " or " Continental forms," regardless of the 

 fact that most of them are regular migrants to and from 

 Europe, and therefore may be one day "British" and the 

 next day " Continental/' 



(5) I take up a number of ' The Ibis ' and find birds that 

 1 have known all my life — or, say, for fifty years — referred 

 to by new and strange names, some of which I never heard 

 before, and which are not to be found in the ' Index Geneium 

 Avium,' so carefully prepared by Mr. F. H. Waterhouse, 

 e.g. Ixobrychus for the Little Bittern. The worst of it is 

 that these new names get adopted by those of a younger 

 generation who think they ought to follow the latest 

 fashion; they appear in print, and before they have been 

 long published some clever grave-digger disinters still older 

 names for which priority is claimed, and the newly-proposed 

 ones have to be relegated to the already overburdened list 

 of synonyms. 



(6) But the practice to which I take the greatest excep- 

 tion, on the score of the inconvenience and confusion which 

 it causes, is that of quoting the 10th edition of Linnseus's 

 ' Systema' (1758) instead of the 12th (1766), which was the 

 last revised by him and published in his life-time. This 

 is a direct violation of the Code of Rules for Zoological 

 Nomenclature drawn up by a Select Committee of the 

 British Association in 1842, reprinted in 1863, and again 

 in 1878, and therefore entitled to " priority." This infringe- 

 ment of principle introduced by American ornithologists 



