President's Address. 293 



might we not expect them to do if the adoption of a 

 trinomial system afforded them further scope for their 

 faculties ? " If the system could be brought into palaeontology, 

 what might we not expect of people who make new species 

 upon broken fish teeth ? They would rush at the new system 

 with hungry avidity, and the results might not conduce to 

 the progress of science. 



Before concluding these somewhat rambling remarks on 

 Nomenclature, I would desire to say a few words on a some- 

 what interesting subject, namely, the attempt sometimes 

 made to substitute vernacular names for Latin ones in 

 systematic Biology. Here I shall content myself with our 

 own language, and the subject as it occasionally manifests 

 itself in English books. 



Some excellent and well-meaning writers, who are of 

 course well aware of the necessity of scientific names, never- 

 theless seem to be persuaded that these names act in deter- 

 ring ordinary people from the study of Natural History. 

 Perfectly aware also that the mass of organisms known to 

 science never had English names, and that the names of 

 such as have them are from want of precision useless in 

 scientific work, they set themselves to work out systems of 

 English names, which, aiming at the same sort of precision 

 as the Latin ones, shall be, like them, binomial or strictly 

 generic and specific in form. We thus have systems of 

 names made up in which ordinary vernacular names are 

 utilised to a considerable extent, yet of course it is con- 

 stantly found that such common names do not exist at all, 

 or if they do, that they will not fit in with the scientific 

 limitations and precision of the various genera dealt with, 

 consequently new names have to be coined, often by 

 anglicising the Latin ones or by translating them, or by adopt- 

 ing them bodily as English words. And as these names in 

 imitation of the scientific ones must be binomial, animals 

 and plants which used to have only one like the Jackdaw, 

 must needs have two, so we must say the Jackdaw Crow ! 

 The result is a set of names which are mostly as unknown 

 to the public as those which they are meant to replace. 



To take an example from Botany, the late Mr Bentham iu his 



