SOME QUESTIONS OF NOMENCLATURE. 479 



characters (" caracieres gradms"), named only the genus, order, class, 

 and the kingdom. In the body of the work sometimes he used the word 

 family instead of order (as for the Birds), but for two orders of the 

 Insects he formally adopted a division into families which were regu- 

 larly named. The first (unnamed) order ("ordre"), with jaws and 

 without wings (" Des insectes pourvus de machoires, et sans ailes"), was 

 divided into several families ( u plusieurs families naturelles") — "les 

 Crustaces," "les Millepieds," "les Aracueides," and "les Phtyreides." 

 The order Nevropteres was disintegrated into three families ("trois 

 families naturelles") — "les Libelles," "les Perles," and "les Agnathes." 

 The representatives of the other (six) orders were distributed directly 

 into genera. 



This, so far as I have been able to discover, was the first time in 

 which an order of the animal kingdom was regularly divided into 

 named families, designated as such. 



In 180G Latreille, in his "Genera Crustaceorum et Insectorum," gave 

 names to families, but on no uniform plan, providing descriptive names 

 for some, as " OxyrhincV for the Maioidean crabs, names based on 

 typical genera, with a patronymic termination, as PalinuHni and Asta- 

 cini, and in other cases names also based on a typical genus, but with 

 a quasi-plural form, as Pagurii. (In the same work, it may be well to 

 add, Latreille also admitted more categories than usual, using ten for 

 the animal kingdom — Sectio, Olassis, Legio, Oenturia, Cohors, Ordo, 

 Familia, Tribus, Genus, aud Species.) 



In 1806 A. M. Constant Dumeril, who had previously contributed 

 tables of classification to Cuvier's "Lecons d'Anatomie Oomparee," 

 and published his own "Elemens d'Histoire Naturelle," brought out 

 his "Zoologie Analytique." In this volume he gave analytical tables 

 for the entire animal kingdom and admitted families for all the classes. 

 The families were generally subordinated to orders, but when the 

 structural diversity within a class did not appear sufficient to require 

 more than one "mute" category the order was sacrificed in favor of 

 the family. His families were generally very comprehensive, often 

 very unnatural, and mostly endowed with descriptive names. (He 

 admitted no more than five named categories in the animal kingdom — 

 class, order, family, genus, and species.) 



As we have seen, Cuvier, Latreille, Rafinesque, and others to some 

 extent, used names ending in -ides and -ini, but the first to fully recog- 

 nize the advisability of using patronymic family names universally was 

 William Kirby, who has not often received the credit for so doing, aud 

 is probably unknown to most in such connection. Nevertheless, in a 

 note to his memoir on " Strepsiptera, a new order of insects pro- 

 posed," 1 he explicitly introduced this important feature in systematic 



'The suggestion of Kirby is to be found in a footnote (p. 88) to the seventh 

 memoir published in "The Transactions of the Linnsean Society of London" (XL, 

 86-122, pi. 8, 9). The memoir was "read March 19, 1811." The date of the whole 

 volume is 1815. 



