686 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. V. No. 122. 



their distribution in groups which coincide 

 with the geographical divisions of their 

 habitat. For the way in which he has 

 worked out this, the most important, part of 

 the article, no one can feel anything but ad- 

 miration. But I quarrel with the termi- 

 nology by which he seeks to describe the 

 results at which he has arrived. He divides 

 the coyote into a large number of different 

 species, giving to each full specific raiik 

 and a specific name, in accordance with the 

 theory of binomial nomenclature. 



Now, terminology is a matter of mere 

 convenience, and it is nothing like as im- 

 portant as the facts themselves. IS'everthe- 

 less terminology has a certain importance 

 of its own. It is especially important that 

 it should not be clumsy or such as to con- 

 fuse or mislead the student. Although 

 species is a less arbitrary term than genus; 

 still it remains true that it is more or less 

 arbitrary. If one man chooses to consider 

 as species what other men generally agree 

 in treating merely as varieties it is unfortu- 

 nate, both because the word is twisted away 

 from its common use and further because 

 it confuses matters to use it in a new sense 

 to the exclusion of the word commonly used 

 in that sense. Moreover, it is a pity where 

 it can be avoided, to use the word so that it 

 has entirely different weights in different 

 cases. 



I can illustrate what I mean by reference 

 to the terminology used in describing the 

 geographical distribution of mammals. It 

 is not very important whether we call the 

 great primary division of the world, 

 faunistically considered, realms or regions. 

 But it is important that we should not use 

 the words first in one sense and then in 

 another, and above all that we should not 

 use the same word with totally different 

 values. For example, Mr. Wallace's classi- 

 fication was absurd in so far as he made 

 the Nearctic, Palearctic, Neotropical and 

 Australian regions of equal value. There 



are differences between the mammalian 

 faunas of northern North America and 

 northern Eurasia, but they are utterly 

 trivial as compared with the differences 

 which divide the fauna of both regions 

 from the fauna of either South America or 

 Australia, or indeed of South Africa. To 

 indicate by the nomenclature used that the 

 differences are of equal importance in the 

 four cases is as misleading as it would be 

 to describe the ethnology of the United 

 States in terms that would imply that the 

 New Englanders, the Kentuckians, the 

 Indians and the Negroes formed four divi- 

 sions of about even rank. There are differ- 

 ences between the New Englanders and the 

 Kentuckians ; but no one would dream of 

 distinguishing the two by terms that would 

 imply that they were as widely separated as 

 either is from the Indians or Negroes. 



It seems to me that the same principle 

 should hold true of the excessive multipli- 

 cation of specific terms to describe the dif- 

 ferent varieties of a group of animals like 

 the coyote. Specific as well as generic 

 terms are quite as useful in denoting like- 

 ness as in denoting unlikeness. The exces- 

 sive multiplication of the species in the 

 books cannot, as it seems to me, serve any 

 useful purpose, and may eventually destroy 

 all the good of the Latin binomial nomen- 

 clature. In the group of wolves, for in- 

 stance, so far as North America is con- 

 cerned, the really important points to re- 

 member and to bring out are that there are 

 two types : one, the small wolf, the coyote, 

 which, wherever found, is sharply separated 

 from the other, and only exists in a portion 

 of North America ; and the other, the large 

 wolf, which is much more widely distributed 

 over North America than the coyote, and 

 is practically identical with the wolf of 

 Europe and north Asia. There are a great 

 many varieties of each, just as there are 

 doubtless a great many varieties of wolves 

 in Europe and north Asia. Among coyotes 



