598 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IV. No. 95. 



ordinated to orders ; but wlien the structural 

 diversity within a class did not appear suffi- 

 cient to require more than one * mute ' 

 category the order was sacrificed in favor 

 of the family. His families were generally 

 very comprehensive, often very unnatural, 

 and mostly endowed with descriptive names. 

 (He admitted no more than five named 

 categories in the animal kingdom — class, 

 order, family, genus and species.) 



As we have seen, Cuvier, Latreille, Ea- 

 finesque and others, to some extent, used 

 names ending in -ides and -ini ; but the first 

 to fully recognize the advisability of using 

 patronymic family names universally was 

 William Kirby, who has not often received 

 the credit for so doing, and is probably un- 

 known to most in such connection. Never- 

 theless, in a note to his memoir on ' Strep- 

 sip tera, a new Order of Insects proposed,'*^ 

 he explicitly introduced this important fea- 

 ture in systematic terminology. He com- 

 plained thatLatreille's names '■ have not that 

 harmony and uniformity of termination 

 which is necessary to make them easily re- 

 tained by the memory,' Continuing, he 

 added, ' If we adopted a patronymic appella- 

 tion for these sections, for instance, Coleop- 

 tera Scarabceidce, Coleoptera StaphyUnidai, 

 Coleoptera SphceridiadcE, Orthoptera Gryl- 

 ledce, etc., it would be liable to no objection 

 of this kind.' 



The suggestion thus made was heeded. 

 The English naturalists (especially William 

 Elford Leach and John Edward Gray) 

 soon applied the method inculcated, and 

 from them it has spread to the naturalists of 

 every land; but the original impulse has 

 been forgotten. For this reason I have re- 

 called the memory of Kirbj^'s work. 



* The suggestion of Kirby is to be found in a foot- 

 note (p. 88) to the seventh memoir published in 

 ' the Transactions of the Linnsean Society of London' 

 (XI., 86-122, pi. 8, 9). The memoir was 'read 

 March 19, 1811 ; ' the date of the whole volume is 

 1815. 



But it was long before the expediency 

 of this procedure was universally recog- 

 nized, and even yet there are dissentients. 

 One objection was that the termination -icZoe 

 was not consistent with Latin words. Prof. 

 Agassiz was never reconciled to such names, 

 and gave names of Grreek origin the termin- 

 ation -oidce, and those of Latin the ending 

 -incB. In his sj^stem, too, there was no dis- 

 tinction between families and subfamilies, 

 both having terminations in consonance 

 with the origin of the stems, and not the 

 taxonomic value of the groups. 



The endings -idee and -oidce have been 

 often supposed to be identical, and even in 

 highly esteemed dictionaries (as ' The Im- 

 perial Dictionary of the English Language') 

 the terminal element of family names end- 

 ing in -idee is derived from ' sldo?, resem- 

 blance.' As already indicated, however, 

 words so terminated should be considered 

 as patronymics. But those ending in -oidce, 

 -oidei, and -oidea may be assumed to be di- 

 rect components with el^o?. 



In answer to the objection (by Burmeister 

 for example) that patronymic names are 

 foreign to the genius of the Latin language, 

 or at least of Latin prose, the fact that such 

 a poet as Yergil has a large number shows 

 that there is no pervading antagonism. 



SUBFAMILY. 



N"ext to the family, the term ' subfamily ' 

 was the earliest, and has been the one most 

 generally accepted of the groups now 

 adopted. But the name itself was not used 

 till long after ' family ' had come into gen- 

 eral vogue. The chief subdivision of the 

 family had been named tribe (^^ tribu'),hj 

 Latreille, in 1806, and he continued to use 

 that term. C. S. Bafinesque, in 1815, used 

 the word subfamily (' sous-famille') for 

 groups of the same relative rank as the 

 ' tribu ' of Latreille, but gave generally de- 

 scriptive names, with modified nominative 

 plural endings (e. g., Monodactylia) , although 



