49-4 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 
prevent such a scheme being adopted, that I am proposing to fetter 
research. I admit the difficulties, but do not regard them as insuperable. 
When you recall the international Clearing Houses for the Postal and 
Telegraphic service, for the banking of the world, and when we reflect 
what private enterprise does, under the name of Lloyd’s, for the shipping of 
the world, how it registers and describes and certifies with a minuteness 
not surpassed by any maker of species, each ship in the world; how, 
through its signal stations and by 6ther means, it follows the daily course 
of each vessel, so that at any hour of any day it can state where, under 
normal circumstances, that vessel is, it does not seem to me impossible to 
come to some understanding as to dealing with the animals of the world. 
Only by some such means can we hope to cope with the problem before us. 
One other fruitful source of ‘waste of time’ I will mention. That is 
the debatable matter of zoological nomenclature, more especially the ques- 
tious of synonymy. The British Association at their last meeting passed 
a resolution on the proposal of Mr. G. A. Boulenger in the following sense : — 
‘The undersigned zoologists, whilst fully realising the justice and 
utility of the rule of priority in the choice of scientific names for animals, 
as first laid down by a committee of the British Association in 1842, wish 
to protest against the abuse to which it has been put as a result of the 
most recent codes of nomenclature, and consider that names which have 
had currency for a great number of years should, unless preoccupied, be 
retained in the sense in which they have been universally used. Considering 
the confusion that must result from the strict application of the rule of 
priority, they would welcome action leading to the adoption of a scheme 
by which such names as have received the sanction of general usage, and 
have been invariably employed by the masters of zoology in the past 
century, would be scheduled as unremovable.’ 
Mr. G. A. Boulenger expressed disapproval of the extreme application 
of the rule of priority in zoological nomenclature on the ground that it 
had already produced much mischief under the pretence of arriving at 
ultimate uniformity. The worst feature of the abuse of this rule is not 
so much the bestowal of unknown names on well-known animals as the transfer 
of names from one to another, as in the case of Astacus, Torpedo, Holothuria, 
Simia, Cynocephalus, &c., so that the names which were uniformly used 
by Cuvier, Johannes Miller, Owen, Agassiz, Darwin, Huxley, and Gegen- 
baur would no longer convey any meaning; very often they would be mis- 
understood, and the very object for which Latin or Latinised names were 
introduced would be defeated. 
The International Congress of Zoology takes, I believe, a somewhat 
sterner view, but they are engaged in drawing up a list of names which they 
hope will be accepted for all time. I for one am prepared to accept them, 
and I am prepared to go further. I would ask the International Congress 
if, instead of drawing up a list of single species, or perhaps in addition to 
it, they would draw up a list of systematic monographs, the names in which 
may be regarded as final. After all, modern classification began with a 
book, and it would take no longer, or very little longer, to sanctify a book 
which may contain diagnoses of hundreds of species than to sanctify the 
single species. The idea is due to Mr. Cyril Crossland, and he suggests—he 
was working at Chaetopods—that such works as Claparéde’s Annelides 
Polychétes du Golfe de Naples, Ehler’s Die Borstenwiirmer, McIntosh’s 
Monograph of the British Annelids be accepted. Possibly whole categories 
_of books might be considered, such as the Challenger Reports, and especially 
Das Tierreich, the admirable volumes of which we owe to the enterprise of 
the Berlin Zoological Society. Such a scheme would certainly cause some 
minor injustices, but every scheme does that. The immense advantage of 
allowing a researcher to readily determine and give an accepted name to an 
animal he is inyestigating without waiting weary days in struggling through 
