202 EDITORIAL 



of the most imperative thought has grown to such magnitude 

 that any labor wasted upon the trammelings of verbiage falls into 

 the category of the reprehensible. It would be an interesting 

 investigation which should show how great an amount of igno- 

 rance of vital truths is justly chargeable to the time consumed 

 in gaining a questionable mastery of the needless, not to say the 

 positively pernicious, factors of a language whose evolution is a 

 century behind the times. It would be an instructive investiga- 

 tion in criminology which should ascertain how much of suffering, 

 death, and other disasters arise from crowding aside instruction 

 in vital matters to make room for the dull grind upon the sense- 

 less conventionalities of a delinquent language. 



To the already deplorable state of things chargeable to lin- 

 guists, teachers, and the common public, the devotees of science 

 are adding their special inflictions, and if present practices con- 

 tinue there will apparently be no remedy in the future but open 

 rebellion. It is said that the number of organic species and 

 varieties has grown already into the neighborhood of one mil- 

 lion, and each of these is burdened with a binomial, if not a 

 trinomial, designation consisting usually of an artificial breccia 

 of Greek, Latin, local, personal, and other verbal fragments, 

 rudely stuck together and finished off at the end in Latin fash- 

 ion. They are "neither fish nor flesh, nor good red herring." 



Our mineralogical terminology which endeavors to impose 

 on all futurity unmouthable distortions of the names of insignifi- 

 cant streams or mountains or villages or collectors or scientific 

 friends unworthily rivals the biological monstrosities. And 

 when we come to compound these into the names of rocks, in 

 pursuance of a most natural and laudable system of nomencla- 

 ture, their uncouthness is more than doubly emphasized, and 

 becomes almost prohibitory. If geologists in their own field 

 are not coequal sinners, it is, perhaps, only due to a less urgent 

 need for terms. When we contemplate that to which this incon- 

 siderate practice will inevitably lead as the number of varieties 

 and species and distinctions increase with the progress of 

 research, the seriousness of the evil becomes intensified. When 



