November 22, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



723 



pears to have received heretofore very little 

 formal recognition. He began his work before 

 there was any authoritative code of nomen- 

 clature; the basis of his decisions was, as he 

 states, " the inflexible rule of priority," 

 strictly enforced, which he employed without 

 any of the modern restrictions as to when it 

 should begin to be operative. He was handi- 

 capped; as he especially complains, by the lack 

 of the works of continental authorities; and 

 his knowledge of the world's omis at this early 

 date (1840-1842) was grossly defective, judged 

 even by his own later standards. When pre- 

 paring the first three editions of his " List of 

 Genera," hundreds of the genera of his prede- 

 cessors were unlinown to him ; many were still 

 omitted from his greatly enlarged 1855 edi- 

 tion, and some few escaped him altogether, as 

 shown by their absence from his wonderfully 

 complete and invaluable " Hand-List of 

 Birds " published in three volumes, 1869-1871. 

 Nor is this surprising, since old names by the 

 Bcore are even now being brought to light. 

 But his early omissions and his early point of 

 view regarding the value and relations of 

 groups named by his predecessors have an im- 

 portant bearing upon the validity of many of 

 his earlier type designations; and also upon 

 the application of rule g of article 30 of the 

 International Code, and, I may add inci- 

 dentally, upon Mr. Stone's strictures upon my 

 alleged treatment of Gray's type designations. 

 A few illustrations of the haphazard manner 

 in which Gray, Lesson, Vigors, Swainson and 

 others designated types from about 1824 to 

 1845 would make clear the impropriety of 

 taking their work too seriously, but space 

 for the purpose can not well be taken in the 

 present connection. 



Mr. Stone says, there are " two methods of 

 type fixing, either of which will yield definite 

 and final results — the first species rule and 

 type by subsequent designation." In as much 

 as the first species rule has been rejected, in 

 effect if not formally, by the Nomenclature 

 Commission of the International Zoological 

 Congress, this is hardly an ingenuous state- 

 ment, coupled as it is with the further asser- 

 tion that the Zoological Commission has " re- 



pudiated the elimination method." As a 

 matter of fact, the elimination method in- 

 cludes " type by subsequent designation " ; a 

 careful canvass of some 500 bird genera shows 

 that the results by the two methods are 

 practically identical, as would be expected on 

 the principle that the greater includes the 

 lesser.^ 



Under a common sense construction of 

 article 30, a species not originally included 

 in the genus can not be taken as its type; 

 neither can the original species of a mono- 

 typic genus, a tautonymic species, nor a 

 species that is the type of a genus by original 

 designation, be subseqiiently taken as the 

 " type by subsequent designation " of some 

 other genus. This being conceded, it is safe 

 to say that the emphatic and unequivocal 

 affirmation, in euphemistic phraseology, of the 

 long-standing " first reviser rule " will ensure 

 the permanency of the types as now recognized 

 of virtually all the genera of vertebrates, and 

 probably of many other groups of animals. 

 To illustrate, the authors of the various vol- 

 umes of the British Museum " Catalogue of 

 Birds " (1874r-1898) assigned types for all of 

 the bird genera known to them, whether valid 

 genera or synonyms, while nearly all of the 

 later published genera have had their types 

 designated by the founder. In a few cases 

 the authors of the British Museum " Cata- 

 logue of Birds " assigned as type of a genus 

 a species not originally contained in it, or 

 otherwise made a few improper designations, 

 but such mistakes are fortunately few. It 

 thus happens that probably 98 per cent, of 

 the genera of birds will be found to have 

 already types that conform to the provisions 

 of the new article 30 of the International 

 Code. 



It remains now simply to hope that the 

 good sense of systematists will lead them to 

 adhere strictly to the International Code. 



J. A. Allen 



» Of. D. W. Coquillett, " The First Reviser and 

 Elimination," SCIENCE, Vol. XXV., pp. 625, 626, 

 April 19, 1907. 



