14 
may have done with his q’s—Leptotila be- 
comes valid and tenable!* This is mere 
juggling with the letters of the alphabet; 
it is absurd, undignified, infantile. We 
should say, first spell Leptoptila correctly, 
according to its obvious formation, and 
then decide on other grounds whether or 
not it be in this form different enough from 
Leptoptilus or Leptoptilos. Literary abortion 
should not be viable in the language of 
science. 
Rule 28 allows difference in termination 
of words to make formal difference in 
names, ¢. g., Sciaphilus in Coleoptera and Sci- 
aphila in Lepidoptera, on the ground that no 
confusion results. How it would be did 
these two fall in the same order of insects is 
not stated. We believe the practice of en- 
tomologists has generally been to allow even 
identical names to coexist in different or- 
ders, on the same ground. Probably the 
latter state of the case is inadmissible in 
any other branch of zoology; but on the 
question whether difference of termination 
or inflection, as indicating grammatical 
gender, shall suffice to distinguish names, 
much might be said either way. Our prac- 
tice is against it. Yet there stand our 
Picus and Pica, and we may yet have to re- 
consider our present canon on this question. 
Certainly Leptoptila and Leptoptilus are better 
distinguished from each other than Lepto- 
tila would be from Leptoptila. One is a dis- 
tinction with a real difference, viz., of 
gender; the other is a distinction with a 
* We are sorry to observe that the A. O. U. is not 
consistent with itse f, even in wrong-doing. Thus: 
(1) Leptotila is held to be tenable, from lack of the p. 
Had it been Leptoptila it would have been untenable, 
from similarity to Leptoptilos. (2) Fregetta Bp. is 
held to be untenable, owing to a prior Fregata of 
Brisson, and Cymodroma is used instead. (3) But 
Pregetta is quite as different from Fregata as either 
Leptotila or Leptoptila is from either Leptoptilus or 
Leptoptilos ; i. e., there is no real difference in either 
case. The A. O. U. is wrong in one of these cases, 
necessarily—which one? 
SCIENCE. 
[N.S. Von. VI. No. 131. 
bogus, spurious, bastard, abortive, illegiti- 
mate apology for a difference. 
Rule 24. ‘A name which involves a 
false proposition is invalid and may be 
changed.”’ One would think this a self- 
evident proposition in science—a truism, to 
adult minds, hardly requiring statutory 
provision. The reverse would be, or should 
be, unthinkable in science. Yet so far 
afield in following the ignis fatuus of verbal 
veneration for the fetish of ‘priority’ have 
some of our codifiers been led that they 
would not dare to correct an error of scien- 
tific fact for fear of disturbing the cerements 
of verbiage in which it was embalmed ! Let 
some one describe an albino crow as Corvus 
albus; shall we go on calling black white to 
the end of the chapter? Let some one de- 
scribe a broken-billed popinjay as Picus semi- 
rostris ; Shall semirostris be the name of any 
species which has a whole beak? Let Gme- 
lin describe a Mexican woodpecker as Picus 
cafer ; shall we declare every time we write 
the name that it is a South African bird ? 
Yet the last is exactly what we do in the 
A. O. U. Check List, where Colaptes cafer 
stands in a catalogue of North American 
birds. It is brutwm fulmen for us to declare 
that a name has no necessary meaning. 
Such declarations simply beat the air in a 
futile and fatuous manner. ‘Cafer’ has no 
meaning for those who do not know what 
it means, but those who do know what it 
means can no more divest it of its reference 
to a South African locality than they can 
take away from Oolaptes its implication of 
carpentering. Granted that we have 
plenty of nonsense-words in science—mere 
combinations of letters, sensu carentes; 
granted that we have to put up with them, 
and that they do very well, like Smith or 
Jones ; that does not make cafer mean Mexi- 
can, or albus mean black. The proposition 
is false, in form and in fact; and falsity is 
foreign to science. Any attempt to save 
the Law of Priority at such hazard, or im- 
