Vol. XIV 
i8b9 Correspondence. 429 
that is, that it is in some way an aid to those who have to deal with the 
enormously complicated and ever growing mass of binomial nomen- 
clature. Such an aid the citation of authority undoubtedly is, but under 
one condition only —when it furnishes a clue to that cardinal event in 
the history of the name to which it is attached, its first published intro- 
duction to the scientific world. When the name of the authority cited 
fails to give this chue it is not only a useless encumbrance to memory, 
but also an actual addition to the inconveniences of our system of nomen- 
clature. And this is the inevitable result of quoting the name of the 
writer of the nomen nudum instead of the publisher. To take a case in 
point: A few years ago Dr. J. A. Allen published a revision of a certain 
group of American chipmunks. Among the forms which he then for the 
first time described was one that Mr. C. H. Townsend had collected in 
Lower California and immediately recognized as new. On the labels of 
the specimens Mr. Townsend had written the specific name odscurus, 
This Dr. Allen adopted, and gave for authority ‘Townsend MS.,’ though 
the description and publication on which the name rests were wholly by 
himself. Suppose now that in a subsequent paper the name is mentioned 
as ‘ Tamias obscurus Townsend, a person not familiar with the trivial 
so to speak, prenatal incidents of nomenclatural history — and no specialist 
can keep them all in mind—will waste time and patience in searching 
through Mr. Townsend’s bibliography for a paper in which a chipmunk 
might have received anew name. When, after abandoning the false clue 
furnished by the citation he proceeds as he would have done in the first 
place had no authority been mentioned, and at length finds the original 
description in a paper by Dr. Allen, he may or may not feel repaid for 
his trouble by the discovery of the vaguely conveyed information that 
Mr. Townsend knew something about the animal before Dr. Allen named 
it. The citation ‘ Zamzas obscurus Allen,’ on the other hand, leads 
unequivocally to the series of papers in which the name first appeared, 
and therefore very materially assists in tracing out its history. 
While the tendency to quote the writer of a manuscript name as author- 
ity‘for the published term probably originated from the prevalent con- 
fusion of the authority for a name with the authority for a species or 
group, in reality no two things could be more unrelated than these, and 
as already stated it is with the first avd the first only that nomenclature 
has to deal. A moment’s reflection will show the truth of this assertion. 
No one regards Linnzus, for instance, as authority for the specific discrim- 
ination of the many American birds whose systematic names are followed 
by the abbreviation ‘Linn.’ He simply took the species described under 
polynomial names by other authors and applied to them binomial desig- 
nations. Similarly when a species is originally described under an unten- 
able binomial, and the mistake is corrected by a subsequent author, the 
latter alone stands as authority for the name, although he did not discover 
the species or introduce it to zodlogy or botany. A well known instance 
is furnished by the name Calamosfiza melanocorys Stejneger. The bird 
