364 PALEONTOLOGY 



is inappropriate : to allow this would involve us in endless 

 confusion, since appropriateness is partly a matter of 

 individual judgment, and if one palaeontologist thinks the 

 appearance of a certain brachiopod sufficiently suggestive 

 of a coin to justify him calling it Obolus, while a later 

 author, failing to see the likeness, is allowed to substitute 

 another name, who is to settle which name is correct ? 

 After all, a name is a name, not a description, and in 

 treating it as such we are following the common-sense 

 customs of ordinary speech. We have in our houses 

 kitchen "coppers" made of galvanized iron, drawing- 

 room fire-" irons " made of brass, and (if still surviving) 

 bedroom candle-" sticks " made of china; men named 

 Short or Little are often taller than others named Long, 

 yet we neither expect them to change their names nor 

 allow them to do so except with much expense and 

 trouble ; and no registrar of births would think of object- 

 ing to such a name as Thomas Thomas on the ground of 

 tautology, or to Violet Green as a contradiction in terms. 

 If we remember that the Latin derivation lucus a non 

 lucendo has become a phrase of general application we 

 need not be shocked at finding that a crustacean with 

 an enormous number of legs is called Apus (footless), or 

 that Agoniatites is not " devoid of an angle " as its name 

 would imply. 



Again, just as the change of manufacture from one 

 material to another has led to such anomalies as brass 

 irons, so the transfer of species from one genus to another 

 has produced curious results. Sometimes a species has 

 been thought to have only a superficial resemblance to a 

 genus to which it has afterwards been found to belong, 

 and the trivial name indicating that resemblance has had 

 to be kept : thus we get Agnostus agnostifor-mis (M'Coy), 

 Axinus axiniformis (Phillips), Dendrophyllia dendrophylloides 

 (Lonsdale), etc. Or again, a species has been named 



