264 HOMES WITHOUT HANDS. 



It is much to be regretted that this plan of iaventing fanciful 

 names and giving them to newly-discovered species should have 

 been so common a practice among systematic zoologists. I hold 

 that both the generic and specific name of every animal and plant 

 should be intelligible, and refer either to some peculiarity of 

 form, habit, colour, or locality. There is no great difficulty in 

 doing so. Greek is a language that affords an inexhaustible 

 supply of compound words, and even if the nomenclator be no 

 scholar, any one who is moderately versed in the classics would 

 compose the desired names if he were only furnished with the 

 necessary information. 



The vagaries in which some nomenclators indulge are so 

 absurd as scarcely to be believed. Firstly, they will invent 

 some word that exists in no language whatever, merely because 

 the sound pleases their ears, and they like to amuse themselves 

 with the conjectures of future zoologists. Then, they will divide 

 the word into its syllables, and make new words with them. 

 Then they will break it up into its component letters, and make 

 as many anagrams as can be pronounced. 



It is quite bad enough to name a new species after some par- 

 ticular friend, or after your favourite dog, horse, or cat, or after 

 the name of your house ; or, as in the present instance, to name 

 an American insect after two defunct cities of Asia and Africa. 

 The former cases show that you have a friend, or a dog, or a cat, 

 or a horse, as the case may be ; and the latter affords conjec- 

 ture that you have a Lempriere's Dictionary. But the allocation 

 of meaningless syllables in order to form a word which was 

 never intended to have any meaning at all, is so utterly senseless 

 and so completely without excuse that no words of reprobation 

 are too strong for it. The very essence of scientific nomencla- 

 ture is to convey ideas, whereas the names invented by the 

 delinquents in question are chosen just because they convey no 

 ideas at all. 



Such persons shelter themselves behind the great name of 

 Linnieus, saying that his fanciful separation of the butterflies 

 into Greeks and Trojans, knights and commoners, was quite as 

 indefensible as their own system, and that the name of an 

 ancient warrior conveys no idea of a butterfly. But in the days 

 of Linnaeus, the father of scientific nomenckture, the art was in 

 its infancy, and necessarily crude and imperfect ; and there is 



