THE 
soa?! G Monthly 3 IY 
aS VOLUME VIIL vo 
E <A ee eee Y al 
ON THE APPLICATION OF THE MAXIM “ COMMUNIS ERROR 
FACIT JUS” TO SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 
BY W. ARNOLD LEWIS. 
It has occurred to me, that some slight amplification of the views 
I ventured to express on this head at the April meeting of the Ento- 
mological Society might be made the subject of a note for the “ Maga- 
zine.’ My suggestion is, that the maxim “ communis error facit jus” 
should govern scientific nomenclature ; and, in support of it, I beg to 
submit to entomologists the following considerations. 
In the first place, changes in names bring absolutely no benefit to 
science: I place this in the front of my position. The study bestowed 
on books, with the express object of now and then disinterring 
“prior” name, is, regarded from a purely scientific point of view, 
merely so much hard labour. The writers who bring out a few hun- 
dred forgotten names do science no service at all; and the publication 
of a single unnoticed fact in the habits of the hive-bee is of greater 
value to science than a reform of the nomenclature of all the Orders. 
Science is supremely indifferent as to the names by which its subjects 
are designated ; and those Americans who have begun to name species 
“ Know-nothing,’ and so on, may be by far the best observers, and 
be doing more for science than a dozen of your keen reformers of 
nomenclature. It is dreadfully frivolous work, I venture to think, 
this routing out from libraries of doubtful and obscure descriptions, and 
the spending of precious years in nicely balancing considerations upon 
the priority ofa name. To give the title of scientific discovery to such 
a process would be to apply rich gilding to a very cheap and common 
sort of ginger-bread. But, besides this work doing science no service, 
it unhappily supplies a kind of “fatigue duty,” to keep employed 
energies which, if better directed, would produce something worthy 
and profitable. A small part only of the acumen brought to bear on 
such studies would ere this have been supplied us in England with a 
scheme of the arrangement of the Lepidoptera; and, if that be not too 
much to expect, with a Lepidopterist able to explain it. 
