INTRODUCTION xix 



We may be enslaved by some prejudice, and our patience may 

 have been ruffled in the attempt to decipher some recent writings 

 of American authors on fossil shells ; but we cannot help uttering 

 a protest against the clothing of a tissue of hypothetical fabrications 

 in a garb of a precisely-defined scientific nomenclature.' 



In a note to p. 1366, Nicholson and Lydekker 1 complain of 

 the same trouble. Regarding the genera of Rhinoceroses of the 

 American school, they say : 



' From the writers' point of view the multiplication of generic 

 terms, which, as our knowledge advances, must become less and 

 less susceptible of exact definition, tends to drown the science in a 

 sea of names, which form a great burden to the memory, and thus 

 tend to destroy the very object of classification.' 



Classification is not the end of a science, but the means of 

 facilitating the conception of creation by the method of evolution ; 

 and if the whole conception be obscured under a heap of names, its 

 object will be surely defeated. 



' La haute science ' would appear to consist now in the faculty 

 of inventing such names as the following : ' ids,' ' idants,' ' idio- 

 plasm,' ' somatic idio-plasm,' * morpho-plasm,' * apical-plasm,' as 

 composing the 'sphere' of germ-plasm, and which the late 

 Professor Romanes 2 compared to the nine circles of Dante's 

 Inferno \ 



I ask again, if scientists are groaning under the grip of this 

 ' demon ' of chaotic modern nomenclature, what should the poor 

 beginner say, who would have to commit to memory such an 

 amount of useless terms before he can understand what the 

 professor is talking about. All this needless multiplication of 

 terms is worrying and distressing to the ' grey matter ' of the brain 



1 Manual of Paleontology. 2 Examination of Weismannism^. 118. 



