2G8 A MONOGRAPH OF THE CINNYRID^ 



Now this does not appear to us to be necessarily true • in the 

 first place the proposition is based only upon one of the re- 

 commendations, not on any rule of the British Association ; in 

 the second place this latter refers clearly only to the future — 

 the whole spirit of the Code is against any changes in existing 

 nomenclature where that is binomial, or in the case of families 

 ends in idee — the Committee say : — 



" It is recommended that the assemblages of genera termed 

 families should be uniformly named by adding the termination 

 idee to the name of the earliest known, or most typically cha- 

 racterized genus in them." 



If no family ending in idee, exists comprising exactly that 

 group of genera which it is desired to unite under one family 

 name, and it becomes necessary to make what is virtually a new 

 family, then unquestionably any adherent to the Code ought 

 to frame that new name on that " of the earliest known or most 

 typically characterized genus." 



But if a family ending in idee already exists, covering pre- 

 cisely the required limits, then the law of priority, as laid down 

 by Strickland, entirely bars the rejection of that and the con- 

 struction of a new name, even though such existing family may 

 not have been based on "the earliest known, &c, genus" ; and 

 if there are two or more such families, each exactly fitting the 

 space to be covered, then you must take the oldest. 



In the present case therefore if Captain Shelley means to 

 define his family so as to be exactly equivalent to Vigors', he 

 is correct in adopting Vigors' name. But if he intends mak- 

 ing a new family differing in its exact limits from any exist- 

 ing family ending in idee, then he ought to call it Neclari- 

 nidee, if Nectarinia is both the oldest and at least one of the 

 most typically characterized genera that he intends to include. 



Now until the work is finished, or at any rate until the 

 general introduction, &c, is published, it is impossible to say 

 whether Captain Shelley's Cinnyridce will be truly equal to 

 Vigors ; his inclusion of Promerops made it seem as if it were 

 to be so, but we understand that he intends to separate the 

 Promeroyielee as a distinct family. 



To return, of that portion of the work that has appeared, we 

 can express almost unqualified approval. 



The author himself has observed numbers of the species in 

 life, and his original notes add much to the value of the mono- 

 graph. The synonymy appears to have been with some few 

 exceptions most carefully worked up, and the plates are, as 

 a rule, lovely, except inasmuch as they exhibit almost every 

 species as unnaturally corpulent. Most certainly the delicate 

 slender-bodied Leptocoma (or Cinnyris), zeylonica, could never 



