President's Address. 285 



with recommendation i, which deprecates the propounding 

 of names of "harsh and inelegant pronunciation." The 

 outside public are too ready to denounce as "jawbreakers" 

 even really elegant names of classical origin ; how they can 

 relish such terms as Enaliolimnosaurus crocodilicephcdoidcs, 

 which the committee quote as an example, may be imagined ! 

 And that the making up of such cacophonic names is by no 

 means a thing of the past, any one may convince himself by 

 looking into some of the biological literature constantly 

 issuing from the press. Our poet laureate, Lord Tennyson, 

 in portraying the feelings of a person contemplating a lovely 

 shell which he has picked up on the sea shore, makes him 

 say: 



" What is it ? a learned man 



Could give it a clumsy name. 

 Let liim name it who can, 

 The beauty would be the same." 



Scientific names are indeed not given to organisms with 

 the object that they may fit into lines of poetry, or indeed 

 be used in non-scientific writing at all; but at the same time 

 it is not desirable that they should be of such a form as to 

 outrage the susceptibilities of those who happen to possess 

 musical ears. 



But I am not so sure that I can equally well agree with 

 them in their denunciation of what they call "nonsense 

 names," that is, "names coined at random," without any 

 derivation whatever, such as Assiminia, or Spisula,ov anagrams 

 of other oreneric names such as Dacelo from Alcedo. Most 



o 



writers who have occasion to propose new genera, know by 

 sad experience the difficulty of making up names for them 

 from their Greek dictionaries, and how that when one has 

 fixed upon some salient feature demanding the institution of 

 the genus, and compounded a nice euphonious name to express 

 it, one is pretty sure to find, on testing it by reference to the 

 " Nomenclator," that it is long ago preoccupied by some beetle 

 or bee, or something of that sort. In fact so enormous is 

 the number of genera already proposed, that unless we con- 

 sent to the repetition of the same name in different divisions 

 of the Animal or Vegetable Kingdoms, the difficulty of 



