Febeuaey 28, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



305 



who have not had the advantage of a 

 classical education, might not be surpris- 

 ing, although one would think they would 

 prefer to avoid publicly displaying the 

 ■fact, and would be willing to travel some 

 distance in order to find some person who 

 could help them in the matter of spell- 

 ing. But when well educated men support 

 such a doctrine, one feels that they have cre- 

 ated out of the law of priority a fetish which 

 they worship with a devotion quite too nar- 

 row. The form of our nomenclatuz-e being- 

 Latin, the rules of Latin orthography and 

 grammar are as incumbent on us to observe, 

 as are the corresponding rules of English 

 grammar in our ordinary speech. This cult, 

 so far as I know, exists only in the United 

 States and among certaiu members of the 

 American Ornithologists' Union. The pre- 

 servation of names which their authors never 

 defined ; of names which their proposers mis- 

 spelled ; of names from the Greek in Greek 

 instead of Latin form ; of English hyphens 

 in Latin composition ; and of hybrid com- 

 binations of Greek and Latin, are objects 

 hardly worth contending for. Some few 

 authors are quite independent of rules in the 

 use of gender terminations, but I notice the 

 A. O. U. requires these to be printed cor- 

 rectly. Apart from this I notice in the sec- 

 ond edition of their check list of North 

 American Birds, just issued, only eighteen 

 misspellings out of a total number of 768 

 specific and subspecific names, and the gen- 

 eric and other names accompanying. These 

 are of course not due to ignorance on the 

 part of the members of this body, some of 

 whom are distinguished for scholarship, but 

 because of an extreme view of the law of 

 priority. 



In closing I wish to utter a plea for 

 euphony and brevity in the construction of 

 names. In some quarters the making of 

 such names is an unknown art. The sim- 

 ple and appropriate names of Linneus and 

 Cuvier can be still duplicated if students 



would look into the matter. A great num- 

 ber of such names can be devised by the use 

 of significant Greek prefixes attached to sub- 

 stantives which may or may not have 

 been often used. Personal names in Greek 

 have much significance, and they are of- 

 ten short and euphonious. The unap- 

 propriated wealth is so great that there is 

 really no necessity for poverty in this direc- 

 tion. It should be rarely necessary, for in- 

 stance, to construct generic names by add- 

 ing prefixes and suf&xes of no meaning to a 

 standard generic name already in use. 



E. D. Cope. 



THE ORIGIN AND RELATIONS OF THE 

 FLORAS AND FAUNAS OF THE ANT- 

 ARCTIC AND ADJACENT REGIONS.* 



The Geology of the Antarctic Regions. Angelo 

 Hbilpbin, Philadelphia Academy of Na- 

 tural Sciences. 



Reviewing our present knowledge of the 

 Antarctic regions, Prof. Heilprin stated that 

 it rests almost where it was a half-centui-y 

 ago, when Sir James Clark Eoss (1841, 

 1842) made his memorable cruises in the 

 ' Erebus ' and ' Terror,' and attained the 

 high southing of 78° 10'. This was at a 

 position almost due south of New Zealand, 

 along a coast line, sharply defined by ele- 

 vated mountain masses, to which the dar- 

 ing British navigator gave the name of Vic- 

 toria Land. At that time other patches of 

 ice bound land, or what was presumed to be 

 land, had already been discovered and 

 named by Bellamy, Biscoe, Dumont d' 

 Urville, and Wilkes— such as Clarie Land, 

 Sabrina Land, etc., south of the Aus- 

 tralian continent ; Enderby Land, Kemp 

 Land, Graham and Alexander Lands, south 

 of Patagonia — and from these had been con- 

 stituted the Antarctic continent of Wilkes 

 and of many modern geographers. Murray, 



* Report of the discussion before the American 

 Society of Naturalists, Philadelphia, December 

 27, 1895. 



