588 
extensive beds where it has been sorted out by 
hydraulic action as in the Des Plaines valley or 
on the lake shore. A bed several feet wide ex- 
tended along the water’s edge for two hundred 
feet where the lake was encroaching upon the 
shore. The marcasite soon disappears upon ex- 
posure ; it is of such occurrence in the region as 
to contribute to our knowledge of the species. 
Quartz occurs in abundance in both phan- 
erocrystalline and ecryptocrystalline varieties. 
Good scalenohedrons of calcite are found at 
Stony Island imbedded in asphalt. 
The asphalt and maltha which are usually 
disseminated through the Niagara limestone of 
the region occur quite pure in cavities formed 
by the dissolution of fossil ecelenterates, echino- 
derms and mollusks in the strata at Stony 
Island. 
The average of four analyses showed 15% 
mineral matter, 82% organic matter soluble in 
CS:, and 2% of organic non-bituminous matter. 
The asphalt contains 25% petrolene and 75% 
asphaltine. 
HorAcE M. SNYDER, 
Secretary. 
DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE. 
THE APPLICATION OF PRECEDENCE OF PLACE 
IN NOMENCLATURE. 
Ir has occasionally happened in descriptive 
botany and zoology that two or more different 
names have been published by an author for 
the same species in the same work, even on the 
same printed page; in most such cases this has 
occurred by reason of the author regarding 
differing forms of the same organism as specifi- 
cally different, which by subsequent observation 
has proved to be erroneous. The principle of 
now using the first in position of these two or 
more names as the true one, has obtained wide 
recognition, and is a simple and convenient 
method to reach this result. 
There are also a few cases where the same 
thing has occurred with generic names, that is 
to say, by different generic names being pub- 
lished in the same work for groups of species 
which subsequent study has indicated to be 
more satisfactorily regarded as within the nat- 
ural limitations of a single genus, and here 
precedence of place has also been invoked to 
SCIENCE. 
[N. S. Vou. XIII. No. 328. 
determine which appellation the combined 
genera should bear. Here, as in the case of 
species, it is only a question of determining 
which of one or more names for the same 
things is the one to be employed. 
The principle has been referred to as ‘ priority 
of place,’ and perhaps not improperly, but it is 
quite a different matter from priority in time of 
publication, though in its application operating 
in the same manner to determine which of two 
or more rival names is to be used. It finds its 
most explicit presentation in the rules for no- 
menclature adopted by the botanists of the 
American Association for the Advancement of 
Science, at the Madison meeting in 1893, where 
it is thus stated : 
In determining the name of a genus or spe- 
cies to which two or more names have been 
given by an author in the same volume or on 
the same page of a volume, precedence shall 
decide. 
More recently it has been proposed by some 
botanists, as had previously been done by some 
zoologists, to fix the type species of every genus 
originally published with more than one species, 
by selecting for this the species which stands 
first on the page at the place of publication, and 
it has been contended that this is a logical out- 
come of the principle, thus giving it a widely 
different application from that contemplated in 
the rule cited above, by making it apply not to 
the determination of equivalent names for the 
same thing but to non-equivalent names for 
different things, a wholly different proposition. 
Inasmuch as a great many genera have at their 
first publication been made to include more 
than one species, and in a large number of 
instances some of these, often the first in posi- 
tion, have been used by subsequent authors as 
the types of additional genera, this latter-day 
proposition affects an enormously greater num- 
ber of cases than those which fall properly 
under the operation of the rule. 
It is, therefore, clear that there is nothing 
logical in the proposed extension of the prin- 
ciple. This would, of course, operate as an 
artificial short-cut in determining generic types, 
except in the cases where the first species 
named is not definitely understood, but in 
many instances it would lose the historic type 
