1896.] The Formulation of the Natural Sciences. Ill 



ethical, for we instinctively wish to see every man credited 

 with his own work, and not some other man. The law of prior- 

 ity in nomenclature goes no further in this direction than the 

 nature of each case requires. Nomenclature may be an index of 

 much meritorious work, or it may represent comparatively lit- 

 tle work ; but it is to the interest of all of us that it be not 

 used to sustain a false pretence of work that has not been done 

 at all. By insisting on this essential test of honest intentions 

 we retain the taxonomic and phylogenetic work within the 

 circle of a class of men who are competent to it, and cease 

 to hold out rewards to picture makers and cataloguers. 



Another contention of some of the nomenclators who use 

 systematic names proposed without description, is, that the 

 spelling in which they were first printed must not be cor- 

 rected if they contain orthographical and typographical er- 

 rors. That this view should be sustained by men who have 

 not had the advantage of a classical education, might not be 

 surprising, although one would think they would prefer to 

 avoid publicly displaying the fact, and would be willing to 

 travel some distance in order to find some person who could 

 help them in the matter of spelling. But when well educated 

 men support such a doctrine, one feels that they have created out 

 of the law of priority a fetish which they worship with a devotion 

 quite too narrow. The form of our nomenclature being Latin, 

 the rules of Latin orthography and grammar are as incumbent 

 on us to observe, as are the corresponding rules of English 

 grammar in our ordinary speech. This cult so far as I know, 

 exists only in the United States and among certain members 

 of the American Ornithologists Union. The preservation of 

 names which their authors never defined ; of names which 

 their proposers misspelled ; of names from the Greek in Greek 

 instead of Latin form ; of English hyphens in Latin com- 

 position ; and of hybrid combinations of Greek and Latin, 

 are objects hardly worth contending for. Some few authors 

 are quite independent of rules in the use of gender termina- 

 tions, but I notice the A. O. U. requires these to be printed 

 correctly. Apart from this I notice in the second edition of 

 their check list of North American Birds just issued, only 



