Vol. xl. ] 86 
clature—amongst other things—on as stable a basis as 
possible for the generations to follow, and the only way to 
do this is to make some definite rule as to nomenclature and 
adhere to it. The rule made by the International Congress 
and universally agreed to is that priority of nomenclature 
shall be strictly adhered to with effect from the date of 
the 10th Edition of Linnzeus (1758), the founder of bino- 
mialism. This, of course, means that from time to time 
some long-accepted name has to be discarded for another, 
hitherto overlooked and unknown, which preceded it. 
Naturally our own sympathies are in favour of the continua- 
tion of the name we have known all our lives, but our 
children will always know it by the new name and will not 
be bothered with this question of sympathy, if we are only 
consistent, and adopt, as soon as it is ascertained, the name 
to which the bird is properly entitled. If ornithologists of 
the present generation do their duty without first stopping 
to consider whether it will inconvenience them personally, 
those of coming generations will have but little left to do in 
reference to classification and nomenclature. All this, the 
rough foundation-work of ornithology, will have been threshed 
out by ourselves and, perhaps, those who next succeed us. 
Those to come later will be employed in elucidating cause 
and effect, not in finding out what is, but in ascertaining 
why it is and how it has become so. The ornithologist will 
not want to find out in what respect one bird differs from 
another, where it lives, and how it feeds. All this will be 
ready prepared for him to acquire speedily from books, and 
it will be his duty to continue the investigations into reasons 
and results, and to tabulate what he learns as the basis of 
work for yet future generations. 
So too, the oologist will no longer want to know what 
bird lays what kind of egg, but will be discovering why each 
particular kind of egg is laid, how and why it is pigmented 
in a thousand different ways, together with the attendant 
anatomical and biological circumstances. 
Practically all scientific zoological research resolves itself 
into an endless inquiry into the ways of evolution. Hach 
