694 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIV. No. 357. 



not insist on the completed form? Wtiy should 

 pure latinity dread an excessive length ? 



Seriously, is not this a little too much — not 

 too loag, but too childish ? It is only 45 years 

 since a satirical rogue in the Annals and Maga- 

 zine of Natural History suggested that incipient 

 paleontologists might ease their brains by 

 adopting such combinations as Grayoeoncha 

 and Gouldornis, for they would certainly never 

 have been anticipated by any zoologist. Such 

 sarcasm would not carry far to-day ; we have 

 by this time rivaled the imaginary Unclesambo- 

 crinus of the same critic. 



Ridicule will never check people with no 

 sense of the ridiculous. Are rules any better ? 

 Needless to say the original Strickland code 

 never contemplated the possibility of such ab- 

 errations ; it was opposed to all personal gener- 

 ic names in zoology. The British Association 

 Committee of 1864 wished to reject Cookilaria 

 and Morrhua tomcodus, and considered that ' spe- 

 cific names from persons have already been 

 sufficiently prostituted, and personal generic 

 names have increased to a large and undeserv- 

 ing extent' ; both are classed as 'objectionable.^ 

 The rules adopted by the International Zoolog- 

 ical Congress of 1899 say that generic names 

 must consist of a single word (art. 5) ; that 

 they may be derived from either forenames 

 used in antiquity, or from modern surnames 

 (art. 6 g, h) ; that such names should not 

 enter into the formation of compound words 

 (art. 9) ; that when a surname is compound, 

 only one of its components is to be used, e. 

 g., Edwardsia not Milne-Edwardsia (art. 7) and 

 certainly never Milnedwardsia (art 11). But 

 Amilnedwardsia — ! 



It is perfectly obvious that the whole spirit 

 of these rules is totally opposed to the action 

 of Ameghino, and if their letter is not so too 

 it is only because there are some things so 

 ridiculous that nobody has ever dreamed of 

 legislating against them. It remains to be seen 

 whether the dignity, the common sense, and 

 the fellow-feeling of zoologists are strong 

 enough to ignore these Florentinameghinisms, 

 which we should expect to see in some penny- 

 a-liner's pseudo-scientific paragraph for a Sun- 

 day paper, rather than in the publications of a 

 National Academy. F. A. B. 



SOME REMARKS ON PRESIDENT D. S. JORDAN'S 

 ARTICLE ON THE GEOGRAPHICAL DIS- 

 TRIBUTION OF PISHES. 



Professor D. S. Jordan has called attention 

 to a number of highly interesting points in the 

 geographical distribution of fishes,* and I should 

 like to add a few remarks relating to some of 

 the questions discussed. 



1. Similarity of Japanese and European {Medi- 

 terranean) forms. 



Although, according to Professor Jordan, this 

 similarity does not seem to be so very much 

 pronounced among fishes, we have other groups 

 of marine animals in which the same striking 

 fact has been noticed. The present writer has 

 lately called attention to this with reference to 

 the Decapod Crustaceans,! and has expressed 

 the opinion that the connection of Japan and 

 Europe by a continuous shore line was along 

 the northern shores of Siberia, in a geological 

 past when the climate of the circumpolar re- 

 gions was a warmer one, so that at least sub- 

 tropical animals could exist there. The con- 

 tinuous circumpolar distribution of the ances- 

 tors of the respective forms was broken up by 

 the cooling of the pole, the species retreated 

 southward, and found only in the Mediterranean 

 and Japanese seas a congenial climate, where 

 they continue to exist as relics of a former cir- 

 cumpolar distribution. Professor Jordan has 

 apparently not taken into consideration this 

 explanation, which might possibly also be ad- 

 vanced forsomeof the fishesof Japan and Europe. 



2. The submersion of the Isthmus of Suez. 



That there was no important connection be- 

 tween the Red Sea and the Mediterranean after 

 the middle of the Tertiary is a well-known 

 view. Hull X has demonstrated that the faunas 

 of both seas were disconnected since Miocene 

 time, but that in the Pliocene there was again 

 an incomplete connection across the Isthmus of 

 Suez by very shallow water. This agrees well 

 with Professor Jordan's conclusions. Before 

 Miocene, however, there must have been a wide 



* ' The Fish Fauna of Japan, with Observations on 

 the Geographical Distribution of Fishes,' Science, 

 No. 354, October 11, 1901. 



t Bronn's ' Klassen und Ordnungen des Thier- 

 reichs.' Arthropoda. Bd. 5, Abt. 2, p. 1,267. 1900. 



t Nature, Vol. 31, 1885, p. 599. 



