468 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



EDITOEIAL GLEANINGS. 



" Taxonobiy and Evolution." — Under this title ('American 

 Naturalist,' xlviii., p. 369) an anonymous writer "X " has lately been 

 repeating some truisms as to the method of classifying animals for 

 museum purposes and for reference in bionomical, distributional and 

 even in evolutionary literature. The argument seems somewhat 

 Laboratory v. Museum. We quote the following paragraphs : — 



" Linnaeus bestowing Latin names upon animals and plants was 

 simply tripping gaily across the back of a half-submerged Behemoth 

 and mistaking it for dry land. Now the beast is careering around, 

 and in spite of zoological congresses and international rules nobody 

 quite knows what to do with him. No doubt when some zoological 

 czar arises and issues his fiat a uniform system of nomenclature will 

 be adopted and things will begin to straighten themselves out. This 

 can only be a matter of time— the past cannot be altered. On 

 systematists to-day necessarily devolves the dull, difficult and im- 

 portant duty of going through the descriptive work of the early 

 naturalists and emending it; so that Spallanzani's derisive sobriquet 

 of ' nomenclature naturalists ' was a little unjust, even in his time. 



" We assume that the principal object of systematic work is to 

 discover the phylogenetic classification of animals, for which it is 

 surely necessary that every animal as it passes through the systema- 

 tist's hands should be, as far as possible, thoroughly examined and 

 described, no dependence being placed upon a few superficial 

 characters usually selected from the external parts '? That the 

 systematist should concern himself, as he does, with the external 

 parts, leaving the anatomy to other workers, we consider is as bad 

 for the systematist himself as it is bad for the science ; for himself, 

 he is doing work which can only keep his soul alive with difficulty — 

 superficial clerical work which can be ' prompted by no real curiosity 

 and attempts to answer no scientific questions,' and the results of the 

 work itself is often invalidated by the arrival of the destroying angel 

 in the person of the anatomist. For a superficial description often 

 means a wrong classification ; whence it follows that any zoo- 

 geographical deductions therefrom are invalidated ; while a careless 

 description usually ignores the possibilities of variation and shows 

 no evidence of pains having been taken to make identification easy. 



