INTRODUCTION. 5 



starting-point of nomenclature at 1766 this honored code was 

 admirably conceived at the time. It had great influence for 

 good, and did much to bring zoological nomenclature from a 

 loose and almost chaotic state to a fair degree of stability and 

 orderly consistency. Its principal defects are those which 

 could not then have been perceived and avoided, being inherent 

 in the binomial system itself, as has become obvious in the 

 subsequent forty-three years of progress in zoological science, 

 during which time have arisen contingencies and complications 

 which, being unforeseen in 1842, could not have been then 

 provided for. In fine, the Stricklandian Code could not pos- 

 sibly have been made better than the radically faulty binomial 

 scheme upon which it was based, and for the perpetuation 

 of which in all its defects it sedulously provided. No one 

 appears to have suspected, in 1842, that the Linnaean system 

 was not the permanent heritage of science, or that in a few 

 years a theory of evolution was to sap its very foundations, by 

 radically changing men's conceptions of those things to which 

 names were to be furnished. Nevertheless, the half-dozen 

 emendations made to this code by the Bath Committee in 1865 

 were, with one exception, ill-advised, leaving the code less 

 available and efficient than it had been before. The fact, 

 however, that the Stricklandian Code has been from 1842 to 

 the present year the recognized basis of nearly all attempts to 

 improve the formal rules for zoological nomenclature, is ample 

 evidence of its usefulness and general soundness, so long as we 

 must continue to base our nomenclature upon the Linnaean 

 binomial system. The wide-spread recognition of its weight 

 and authority in nomenclature, and the almost universal cur- 

 rency of its leading provisions, which are in the main as satis- 

 factory as any can well be which provide for a strictly binomial 

 system, in short, the strength of the Stricklandian Code, ren- 

 ders it still the natural and proper basis of any new code which 

 may seek to provide for the comparatively few contingencies 

 to meet which the former one has proven inadequate. 1 



1 The Committee which drafted the original ' Stricklandian ' Code, appointed at 

 a meeting of the Council of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 



