480 SOME QUESTIONS OF NOMENCLATIVE. 



terminology. He complained that Latreille's names "have not that 

 harmony and uniformity of termination which is necessary to make 

 them easily retained by the memory." Continuing he added, "If we 

 adopted a patronymic appellation for these sections, for instance, 

 Coleoptera Scarabceidce, Ooleoptera Staphylinidw, Coleoptera Sphceri- 

 diadce, Orthoptera Gryllidce, etc., it would be liable to no objection of 

 this kind." 



The suggestion thus made was heeded. The English naturalists 

 (especially William Elford Leach and John Edward Gray) soon applied 

 the method inculcated, and from them it has spread to the naturalists 

 of every land, but the original impulse has been forgotten. Eor this 

 reason I have recalled the memory of Kirby's work. 



But it was long before the expediency of this procedure was uni- 

 versally recognized, and even yet there are dissentients. One objection 

 was that the termination -idee was not consistent with Latin words. 

 Prof. Agassiz was never reconciled to such names, and gave names of 

 Greek origin the termination -oidce, and those of Latin the ending -met'. 

 In his system, too, there was no distinction between families and sub- 

 families, both having terminations in consonance with the origin of the 

 stems, and not the taxonomic value of the groups. 



The endings -idee and -oidce have been often supposed to be identical, 

 and even in highly esteemed dictionaries (as "The Imperial Dictionary 

 of the English Language") the terminal element of family names end- 

 ing in -idceis derived from " erdo?;, resemblance." As already indicated, 

 however, words so terminated should be considered as patronymics. 

 But those ending in -oidce, -oidei, and -oidea maybe assumed to be 

 direct components with eidoz. 



In answer to the objection (by Burmeister, for example) that patro- 

 nymic names are foreign to the genius of the Latin language, or at least 

 of Latin prose, the fact that such a poet as Virgil has a large number, 

 shows that there is no prevailing antagonism. 



SUBFAMILY. 



Next to the family, the term "subfamily" was the earliest, and has 

 been the one most generally accepted of the groups now adopted. But 

 the name itself was not used till long after " family" had come into gen- 

 eral vogue. The chief subdivision of the family had been named tribe 

 (" tribu"), by Latreille, in 180G, and he continued to use that term. 

 O. S. Bafinesque, in 1815, used the word subfamily ("sous -fa/mi tie") for 

 groups of the same relative rank as the " tribu" of Latreille, but gave 

 generally descriptive names, with modified nominative plural endings 

 (e. ()., Mono d act ylia), although sometimes he named the group after 

 the priucpal genus (e. g., Percidia). The subfamily is now generally 

 recognized, and its ending rendered by -ince, or more seldom ini or -ina. 

 This is rather a termination for Latin adjectives involving the idea of 

 relation or x>ertinence. 



