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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXII. No. 818 



teration' of hundreds of -well-knowii names 

 that are root-names of many more genera 

 within their respective groups: and such de- 

 rived names, once of great assistance to the 

 memory, have, so to speak, the props knocked 

 from under them. 



4. Finally, and most lamentably of all, by 

 our hasty and profitless abandonment of even 

 the best-known family names we have broken 

 with our best traditions and have thrown our 

 biological literature out of joint. 



The pursuit of stability through rules of 

 priority that has led to all this is surely one 

 of the most singular of contemporary psycho- 

 logical phenomena. Codes of rules, inter- 

 preted by anybody and enforced by nobody 

 have not been able to command the united 

 support of public opinion among us, and we 

 have at last begun to refer our disputes to the 

 international commission for final adjudica- 

 tion. And we seem to be getting results — of 

 the sort hitherto aimed at: i. e., progress in 

 the application of the law of priority. And 

 some of us are beginning to wonder why this 

 commission, if capable of disposing of small 

 matters acceptably, might not have been en- 

 trusted with larger ones. Why should it de- 

 termine merely whether a certain forgotten 

 name, abandoned by its author and never 

 used, is really eligible for use under the rules 

 of the code? It grieves me to see fifteen big 

 brainy men, capable of doing something ra- 

 tonal, put into a hole where they are expected 

 to do only such little sinful things as this. 



^ A curious case comes to hand in van der 

 Weele's recent and excellent monograpli of the 

 Ascalaphidae (Neuroptera) . Van der Weele re- 

 stores the original spelling Suhpalaesa, to a genus 

 which Lefebure in 1842 created as an anagram out 

 of the name Ascalaphus. (Kolbe made Phalascusa 

 by like performance in 1897.) Hagen had in 1866 

 altered the name of Suphalasca, and in this form 

 it had ever since been used. Now names of this 

 sort are hard to remember at best: yet van der 

 Weele creates two new names with the spelling 

 he has just eliminated, leaving to future genera- 

 tions the task of learning for three closely allied 

 genera the following: SUHPALACSA, SUPHALO- 

 MITUS, STEPHANOLASCA. Verily, " What has 

 posterity done for us 1 " 



The object of this article is not to criticize 

 rules or codes, but to suggest an inquiry as 

 to whether there is not a better way of dis- 

 posing of our nomenclatural trouble than by 

 making it as burdensome as possible and then 

 making it permanent. Names are the handles 

 by means of which we move all our intellec- 

 tual luggage. The first requisites of handles 

 are that they should be easy to grasp and easy 

 to retain hold of. Our spade and axe and 

 scissors handles are shaped to fit our hands: 

 why should not our generic and family names 

 be shaped to fit our brains? If they are for 

 use, they must be so fitted. Granting that 

 stability is speedily attainable with our pres- 

 ent machinery, we have yet need to inquire 

 whether we have fashioned the sort of a set 

 of names that we should seek to perpetuate. 

 We have been too much taken up with 

 codes, and have given far too little considera- 

 tion to evils more fundamentally important. 

 Our worst and most permanent difficulties are 

 not due to synonymy, but to the enormous 

 growth of systematic knowledge, and to the 

 natural limitations of men's minds. They are 

 such difficulties as attend vigorous growth in 

 any human enterprise. Changed conditions 

 create new needs. 



Our binomial nomenclature is not that of 

 Linnseus. In the first place it is not binomial; 

 for, even when not dealing with varieties or 

 races, we add to the names of genus and 

 species the names of one or two authors, and 

 thus make it tri- or quadri-nomial. In the 

 second place, it is not simple and straight- 

 forward and serviceable as his was. The 

 Linnaean system won its way because it was 

 fit. It reduced the long descriptive Latin 

 phrases previously used for designating 

 species, to two words, only one of which, like 

 a given name, had to be learned for each 

 species. It provided a simple and consistent 

 method for designating additional and un- 

 known species as they should become known. 

 Genera were few, and names were for the most 

 part simple and significant. In a large part 

 they were not new names, but were selected 

 because of the past service they had rendered: 



