1909 1 Brewster, Something More about Black Ducks. 179 



Just as eels are said to have become reconciled to being skinned 

 alive, so most ornithologists are learning, I suspect, to regard with 

 resignation or indifference, not unmingled with disgust, the ever- 

 increasing and apparently quite hopeless instability of their technical 

 nomenclature. Fortunately there are the English names of birds 

 to which one may turn with blessed sense of relief because of their 

 comparatively fixed and stable character. For they have changed 

 but little since the days of Wilson and Audubon, although purists 

 have not failed to suggest that they should be critically looked into 

 and perhaps extensively emended. Heaven forbid that this ever 

 come to pass! It would mean universal chaos in ornithological 

 nomenclature. Surely we have enough of trial and tribulation to 

 bear with this ceaseless tinkering of the scientific names. They 

 stand, of course, on a different basis from the others, being governed 

 by a complicated system of laws and traditions to which we have 

 so bound ourselves that we must support and enforce them unflinch- 

 ingly, though the skies fall. For this state of affairs, indeed, there 

 would seem to be no help despite the nomenclatural tragedies which 

 continue to follow one another in dreary and endless succession. 

 Among these there has perhaps been no recent case sadder to con- 

 template than that afforded by the Black Ducks. Nor is the re- 

 arrangement of names in this group which I have just proposed 

 certain to prove final. It might be overthrown, for example, by 

 the discovery that the Florida Duck or the Mottled Duck inter- 

 grades with one or the other of the two more northern forms. If 

 this possibility should ever develop into an established fact it would 

 become necessary to treat three of these birds as subspecies of the 

 fourth which would be the Florida Duck, Anas fulvigula, for its 

 name dates back to 1874, and hence is older than those of any of 

 the others. 



