160 Prof. A. Newton on some Moot Points 



in all the dignity of capitals, "Bvbo IGNAVVS," as the author's 

 deliberately adopted name for the Eagle-Owl, which no sugges- 

 tion of its being in the first case a synonym can explain away ! 

 Perhaps Mr. Sclater may say that I ought to have added a 

 reference to this fact ; but it certainly never entered my head 

 that the omission would mislead so well-read an ornithologist, 

 and, accordingly, I thought it enough solely to quote the first 

 use of the name, as is my custom*. 



Lastly, as regards Mr. Sclater, I come to the case of Athene 

 versus Carine. He rightly assigns the reason why I adopted 

 the latter. Athena had a prior use in entomology, and no one 

 can doubt \hoX Athena and Athene are one and the same word, 

 the difference of the final letter being merely dialectic. Now this 

 is not so with Pica and Picus, which he cites as a parallel 

 case. Those are perfectly distinct words, to which a perfectly 

 distinct meaning has been attached from the days of Pliny to 

 our own. I am sure Mr. Sclater is too good a scholar not to 

 admit this fact on reconsideration ; and that he objects to 

 homonyms is evident by his substitution, in this very number 

 of i The Ibis' (p. 388), of Calochaites for Euchcetes, because, 

 though more than twenty years ago he conferred the latter on a 

 Tanager, it had, more than twenty years before that, been ap- 

 plied to a Beetle. 



The objections raised by Mr. Seebohm refer to another 

 group of birds, the Warblers ; and he has my fullest sympathy 

 in his difficult task of trying to define it and of determining 

 the names, generic and specific, which its different members 

 should bear. Had I leisure to do so, there are several points 

 in his article ('Ibis,' 1879, pp. 308-317), of far greater im- 

 portance than nomenclatural quibbles, on which I would 

 comment ; for I confess that in some places I fail to catch his 

 precise meaning ; but here I shall limit myself to two, in 

 which he has arrived at results differing from those I have 

 reached. 



The first of these concerns the specific name to be applied 

 to the Greater Whitethroat. To the best of my belief, no other 

 writer for the past sixty years and more has questioned the 

 fact, that the bird represented by D'Aubenton (PI. Enl. 581. 

 fig. 1) was of this species t- Temminck, not once but twice, 



* Mr. Sclater thinks that " the excellent name of Buho maximus" be- 

 stowed by Fleming in 1828, should be adopted for this species. I have 

 accordingly to remind him that Boie, six years earlier, called it B. athe- 

 niensis (' Isis,' 1822, p. 549), which looks as if Fleming's "name must 

 therefore be rejected." 



t There is an apparent but not real exception in Vieillot ; for his Sylvia 

 fruticeti is admittedly the Greater Whitethroat in autumnal plumage (<•/', 

 Degland, Orn. Eur. i. p. 536), 



