How Brros Aare NAMED, 
Priority,’ the first specific name properly given to an animal is the one 
by which it shall always be known, provided of course, the same name 
in combination with the generic term euployes has never been used 
for any other animal. 
The questions Why use all these Latin terms? Why not call the bird 
“Robin” and be done with it? are easily answered. Widely dis- 
tributed birds frequently have different names in different parts of their 
range. The Flicker (Co/aptes auratus), for instance, has over one hun- 
dred common or vernacular names. Again, the same name is often 
applied to wholly different birds. Our Robin(Merula migratoria) is not 
even a member of the same family as the European Robin (Frithacus 
vubecola,( If, therefore, we should write of birds or attempt to classily 
them only by their common names we should be dealing with such un- 
fixed quantities that the result would be inaccurate and misleading. 
But by using one name in a language known to educated people of all 
countries, a writer may indicate, without danger of being misunderstood, 
the particular animal to which he refers. Among people speaking the 
same tongue, where a definite list of vernacular names of animals has 
been established, they can of course be used instead of the scientific 
names. 
Such a list of North American birds has been prepared by the Amer- 
ican Ornithologists’ Union. It furnishes a common as well as scientific 
name for each of our birds, and is the recognized standard of nomen- 
clature among American ornithologists. The names and numbers of 
birds employed in this ‘Color Key’ are those of the American Ornithol- 
ogists’ Union’s ‘Check-List of North American Birds.’ 
It will be observed that in this ‘Check-List,’ and consequently in the 
following pages, many birds have three scientific names, a generic, 
specific, and sub-specific. The Western Robin, for example, appears 
as Merula migratoria propingua. What is the significance of this third 
name? 
In the days of Linnzus, and for many years after, it was supposed 
that a species was a distinct creation whose characters never varied 
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