42 8 Correspondence. on 
responsibility rests with him. With published nomina nuda such is the 
nearly uniform practice, from which there is little if any departure. If, 
on the contrary, a nomen nudum has never been published, if it exists 
only on a collector’s field label, if it has never seen the light except 
through the alcohol of a museum jar, if it lies buried in some posthumous 
or half forgotten manuscript, if it has been suggested verbally only, and 
an author adopts it and defines it,and publishes it, then individual opinion 
begins to run riot. Instead of agreeing that an unpublished nomen 
nudum should be treated exactly like a published one, many writers con- 
sider that it has special prerogatives, and that its existence, to a certain 
degree at least, precludes the free subsequent use of the term. In other 
words, the writer who adopts a manuscript name is not universally con- 
ceeded to be authority for the printed nomenclatural unit, although he 
alone is responsible for its publication, and in nine cases out of ten the 
paper in which it is printed will appear in indexes and bibliographies 
under his name only.1. To some writers it seems proper that the respon- 
sibility for a manuscript name when published should be equally shared 
by the publisher and the writer of the label, arranger of museum speci- 
mens, or writer of the laid aside manuscript. Others, and among them 
the majority of botanists, ignore the publisher. Comparatively few show 
their regard for consistency by a uniform treatment of all nomina nuda, 
whether published or not. 
This confusing lack of uniformity probably arises from two principal 
causes,— first, that the writers of manuscript names are often our personal 
friends, while the publishers of nomina nuda are most of them dead, and 
second, that it is difficult to keep clearly and constantly in mind that 
nomenclature deals not with history, not with botany, not with zodlogy, but 
with names, and that therefore the authority for a name has nothing what- 
ever to do with the authority for a species. With regard to the first of 
these disturbing causes, if such it really be, nothing need be said. The 
second, however, which is undoubtedly by far the more potent, demands 
careful consideration, as it strikes at the root of the whole question of the 
citation of authority. 
Unless we admit, as I fear few of us are honest enough to do, that the 
principal object in writing the name of an author after a nomenclatural 
compound is to tickle worldly vanity, we must, to defend this custom, show 
that it is of some advantage to systematic zodlogy or botany as a whole, 
1A peculiarly apt example is furnished by arecent paper in the ‘ Proceedings ’ 
of the U. S. National Museum (Vol. XIX No. 1115). Here twenty-two new 
fish are described, ‘‘ each in the nameof the person responsible for the determi- 
nation and description.” Among this small number of species no less than 
eleven authorities are quoted in addition to the one which appears at the head 
of the article (this stands for only three! ), and which — so I am informed by a 
member of the Publication Committee —will alone, according to current 
usage, be found in the index to the volume. 
