Letters^ Extracts, and Notes. 333 



Sir, — May we be allowed to make some brief remarks 

 concerning Dr. P. L. Sclater's " Commentary on the new 

 ' Hand-List of British Birds/ ^' which appeared in the last 

 issue of 'The Ibis' (pp. 113-127) ? 



In the first place, Dr. Sclater does us the great injustice of 

 misquoting what we wrote, and thus attributes to us a 

 statement which we were never so ignorant as to have made. 

 Dr. Sclater writes (p. 114) : "it is even stated that the nomen- 

 clature of Birds has been ' neglected for more than 150 

 years, although a requisite of the greatest importance,'*' 

 and further elaborates this misquotation by stating on p. 116 

 "it is not correct to say that the study of Zoological Nomen- 

 clature has been neglected during the past 150 years." We 

 never said anything of the kind. What we wrote was 

 (' Hand-List,' p. vi) : " After all, what is nomenclature ? 

 It is little more than a system of labelling, and yet we have 

 neglected for more than 150 years one of the requisites of 

 greatest importance — that our labels should everywhere be the 

 same for the same bird"" (italics are ours). 



As Dr. Sclater has not only misquoted the words used, but 

 has also entirely misinterpreted their meaning, it is perhaps 

 necessary to point out that we likened nomenclature to a 

 system of labelling, and stated that we had neglected the 

 most important requisite of this system, viz., that our 

 labels (or names) for the same bird should be everywhere 

 uniform. We then proceeded to show how this want of 

 uniformity had arisen and how it had continued for want of 

 the " adoption of a uniform system of nomenclature." The 

 whole of our Introduction is obviously a plea for the 

 universal adoption of one system in order to secure uni- 

 formity, and we uphold the ''International Rules of Zoological 

 Nomenclature " as the only code which has interjintional 

 authority. We do not go into history of this or any other 

 code, and whether we should have done so or not is a matter 

 upon which we as authors and Dr. Sclater as critic may well 

 hold diverse views. But Dr. Sclater's assumption, that 

 because we did not mention Strickland's Code — perhaps the 



