466 SOME QUESTIONS OF NOMENCLATURE. 



are encumbered with so many ancient names that we know were applied 

 to very different animals by the Greeks and Romans. It is Linnaeus 

 that was directly responsible for the misuse of such generic names of 

 mammals as Lemur, Manis, Dasyims; such bird names as Troehilus, 

 Coracias, Phaeton, Diomedea, Meleagris, and (partly with Artedi) such 

 fish names as Chimcera, Centriscus, Pegasus, Callionymus, Trigla, Amia, 

 Teuthis, Esox, JElops, Mormyrus, and Pxoccetus. These all were applied 

 by the ancients to forms most of which are now well ascertained, and 

 the animals to which they have been transferred have nothing in com- 

 mon with the original possessors of the names. 



The misuse of these ancient names is in contravention of the rule 

 adopted by the International Zoological Congress held in Moscow 

 (1892), that " every foreign word employed as a generic or specific name 

 should retain the meaning it has in the language from which it is 

 taken," and of like rules of other associations. The false application 

 by Linnaeus and his followers (and he had many) was due partly to the 

 belief that the ancient names were unidentifiable, but now there are few 

 whose original pertinence is not known. It may be thought by some, 

 however, that we are unduly criticising the doings of the past from the 

 vantage ground of the present. But such is not the case, for at the 

 commencement of his career Linnaeus was taken to task for the fault 

 indicated. Some of those criticisms were so apt that they may be 

 advantageously repeated here. 



Dillenius, of Oxford, wrote to Linnaeus in August, 1737, in these terms : 



We all know the nomenclature of botany to be an Augean stable, 

 which G. Hoffmann, and even Gesner, were not able to cleanse. The 

 task requires much reading and extensive as well as various erudition; 

 nor is it to be given up to hasty or careless hands. You rush upon it 

 and overturn everything. I do not object to Greek words, especially 

 in compound names; but I think the names of the antients ought not 

 rashly and promiscuously to be transferred to our new genera or those of 

 the New World. The day may possibly come when the plants of Theo- 

 phrastus and Dioscorides may be ascertained, and till this happens 

 we had better leave their names as we find them. That desirable end 

 might even now be attained if anyone would visit the countries of these 

 old botanists and make a sufficient stay there; for the inhabitants of 

 those regions are very retentive of names and customs, and know plants 

 at this moment by their antient appellations, very little altered, as any 

 l>erson who reads Bellonius may perceive. I remember your being told 

 by the late Mr. G. Gherard that the modern Greeks, give the name of 

 Amanita (a/uavfaa) to the eatable field mushroom, and yet in Critica 

 Botanica (p. 50) you suppose that word to be French. Who will ever 

 believe the Thya of Theophrastns to be our Arbor vita 1 ? Why do 

 you give the name of Cactus to the Tuna? Do you believe the Tuna, 

 or Meloeactus (pardon the word), and the Arbor vitce were known to 

 Theophrastus? An attentive reader of the description Theophrastus 

 gives of his ftida will probably agree with me that it belongs to our 

 Xympluva, and, indeed, to the white flowered kind. You, without any 

 reason, give that name to the Malvinda, and so in various other in- 

 stances concerning antient names, in which I do not, like Burmann, 

 blame you for introducing new names, but for the bad application of 



