xviii STUDIES IN THE EVOLUTION OF ANIMALS 



plication des langues ; celui qui songera a jeter les bases d'un 

 Edifice taxonomique par trop nouveau aboutira a I'ddification d'une 

 tour de Babel. 



' Si j'insiste sur cette particularity, c'est que moi-meme j'ai ete 

 souvent embarrass^ par la diversity de noms et des classifications, et 

 parce que actuellement, on voit la tendence dont je parle persister 

 encore dans quelques travaux fort remarquables d'ailleurs.' 



Then Mr. Stebbing, in his interesting work on the Crustacea, 

 p. 255, referring to Mr. Spence Bates' 'Report on the Challenger 

 Macrura', says, 'But simplicity seems to be the very last thing 

 considered in Spence Bates' terminology, and though such words 

 as phymacerite, psalistoma, and stylamblys, may help to curtail 

 the length of descriptions, they are only too likely also to curtail 

 the number of those that read them.' 



And certainly this is one of the mischiefs wrought by unneces- 

 sary coining of new terms to express ideas which might in many 

 cases be conveyed in ordinary wording. 



Very recently another note of warning has been sounded in 

 Natural Science of October 1893, under the heading of 'Scientific 

 Linguistics ' : ' When a layman asks a naturalist why he invents 

 and employs such a multitude of incomprehensible technical terms, 

 the common reply is that exact ideas necessitate a precise and 

 universally (!) understood nomenclature. We wonder how this 

 explanation would apply to the terms of " Auxology," or " Bioplast- 

 ology," just discussed by Professor A. Hyatt in the Zoologischer 

 Anzeiger (concluded August 28, 1893). We should like to know 

 how much scientific precision there is in the determination of the 

 nepionic, metanepionic, gerontic, paragerontic, etc., stages of any 

 organism, and what grain of solid fact, as compared with mere specu- 

 lation, in the so-called definition of the phylonepionic, phyloneanic, 

 phylogerontic, etc., phases of development in any group of animals. 



