ON NAMING SPECIES. 39 



Towards the end of this long period of hard 

 taxonomic labour, we know from Darwin's letters 

 that he was extremely tired of the work; but with 

 marvellous resolution — and in spite of the trouble 

 of his health, which was perhaps worse than at 

 any other time — he clung to and carried through 

 this stupendous task, although all the time attracted 

 away from it by the weightier problems which he 

 could never thrust aside after they had once made 

 their claim upon him. 



Darwin was evidently greatly disconcerted at the 

 task of making out those special difficulties which 

 man has added to the difficulties of Nature herself — 

 the disheartening tangle of nomenclature. He thought 

 that the custom of appending the name of the sys- 

 tematist after that of the species or genus he had 

 named was injurious to the interests of science — 

 inducing men to name quickly rather than describe 

 accurately. Some of his remarks on this subject 

 indicate the state of his mind. Thus he wrote to 

 Hooker, October 6th, 1848 :— 



" I have lately been trying to get up an agitation . . . 

 against the practice of Naturalists appending for perpetuity 

 the name of the^rs^ describer to species. I look at this as a 

 direct premium to hasty work, to naming instead of describing. 

 A species ought to have a name so well known that the 

 addition of the author's name would be superfluous, and . . 

 empty vanity. . . . Botany, I fancy, has not suffered so 

 much as zoology from mere naming ; the characters, for- 

 tunately, are more obscure. . . . Why should Naturalists 

 append their own names to new species, when Mineralogists 

 and chemists do not do so to new substances ? " 



