478 SOME QUESTIONS OF NOMENCLATURE. 



did not find it necessary to draw upon the tribiis or subtribus for the 

 arrangement of any family. None others have adopted in detail either 

 of the elaborate schemes proposed by their distinguished authors, and 

 even those authors themselves have not, in their later works, gone into 

 the details they provided for in their schemes. The only divisional 

 name that has been used to any great extent is tribe. That has been 

 frequently employed, but in different ways — sometimes for the divi- 

 sion of an order, sometimes within a suborder, sometimes for a section 

 of a family, again for a part of a subfamily, and even for a fragment of 

 a genus. 1 In two of these widely differing ways it has been used in 

 the systems of Bleeker and Haeckel. It is evident, however, that 

 more groups than the old conventional ones, which alone Agassiz 

 admitted, would be useful at present. A happy mean seems to be 

 realized in the following list: 



Branch Superfamily 



Sub branch Family 



Superclass Subfamily 



Class Supergenus 



Subclass Genus 



Superorder Subgenus 



Order Species 



Suborder Subspecies 



There are only two (or three for trinomialists) of these which are 

 "sonant," all the others being "mute" (to use the expression of Lin- 

 naeus); but a question of termination affects several of them. 



All the supergeneric groups, like families, were originally chiefly 

 designated by descriptive names, but the trend in all the years has 

 been toward names which are based on the stems of existing genera. 



FAMILY. 



In 1796-97 (" an 5 de la B."), Latreille, in bis "Precis des Caracteres 

 generiques des Insectes," for the first time employed the term "family" 

 as a subdivision of an order, but only gave the families numbers ("Fam- 

 ille premiere," " Fain. 2," etc.). 2 He remarked that it might be desira- 

 ble to have the families named, but deferred doing so till he could 

 review the subject with greater care. :! 



In 1798 ("an G"), Cuvier, in his "Tableau Fdeinentaire de l'Histoire 

 naturelle des Animaux," in the introduction, when treating of graded 



'The words "phalanx," "cohors," and "series" (if not others) have been used 

 recently in another manner by Dr. F. A. Sraitt in the "History of Scandinavian 

 Fishes." The sequence in that work is Classis, Ordo, Subordo, Phalanx, Cohors, 

 Series, Familia, Siibfamilia, (ienus, Subgenus, Species. 



• " Les rapports ariatomique, eeux de V Habitus, des metamorphoses, out c"te mes 

 guides dans la formation des families. Files sont pre"ceMees d'un chiffre arabe." 

 p. ix. 



; On eut ih'sin- que j'eusse donne" des noms aux families; mais preVoyant que je 

 serois contraint d'y faire plusieurs changemens, j'eusse ainsi exposd la nomenclature 

 a une vicissitude tics contraire a l'avancement de la science." p. ix. 



