[lO WATER REPTILES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT 



Remains of ichthyosaurs, abundant as they were and are in 

 many deposits in England and Germany, attracted very little 

 attention from the naturalists of the eighteenth century after the 

 time of Scheuchzer and Baier, and nothing more was written about 

 them until 1814, when Sir Everard Home, an EngUsh comparative 

 anatomist, in ah extensive series of large and finely illustrated, 

 though rather discursive, works, described and figured a number 

 of good specimens. To the animal the remains of which he rather 

 vaguely and imperfectly described, he gave in 1819 the name 

 Proteosaurus, in the behef that it was allied to the hving Proteus, 

 a salamander. 



In 1821 the curator of mineralogy of the British Museum — 

 Koenig by name — after a more critical study of other remains, 

 reached the conclusion that these animals were intermediate be- 

 tween the fishes and the reptiles, and gave to them the generic 

 name Ichthyosaurus, meaning fish-reptile, a name by which the 

 chief forms have ever since been known. Within the next few 

 years many specimens of ichthyosaurs were carefully and fully 

 described by Conybeare, Cuvier, Owen, and others of England, 

 France, and Germany, making very clear all the more important 

 details of their skeletal structure. Blaineville, in 1835, thought 

 that the ichthyosaurs constituted a distinct class of vertebrates 

 equivalent to all other reptiles, the birds, and the mammals, which 

 he called Ichthyosauria, the first appearance in literature of the 

 name by which the order is properly known. Five years later, 

 however, the famous English anatomist and paleontologist, the late 

 Sir Richard Owen, united the ichthyosaurs with the plesiosaurs 

 as a single order of reptiles, to which he gave the name Enalio- 

 sauria, meaning sea-reptiles, a name which has long been current 

 in textbooks and general works on natural history. Moreover, 

 Owen rather arbitrarily changed Blaineville's name Ichthyosauria 

 to Ichthyopterygia, a name which is often, though incorrectly, 

 used to designate this order of reptiles. These briefly given and 

 perhaps dry details will make clear how necessary is that rule of 

 priority upon which naturalists so often insist. When anyone may 

 change the names of organisms at will there will be no stabihty 

 and no uniformity, because there is no one to decide, and the pres- 



