1876.] 365 [Hyatt. 



faulty, and calculated only to mislead any naturalist who is desirous 

 of understanding the affinities of these fossils. 



There is nothing to be dreaded in new names, except by those 

 who strive to get the animal kingdom by heart, as if the principal 

 business of life was not to understand things, but to be able to in- 

 dulge in an unending string of parrot talk. New names, like new 

 things of all kinds, are not necessarily bad, they become so only when 

 they violate certain essential restrictions, or are used to represent 

 affinities which have no real existence. Used in a proper manner 

 they are clearly a great advantage, since they force the unwilling or 

 indifferent to pay some attention to the new views announced, and to 

 represent or criticise them more or less in their collections and writ- 

 ings, and in this way they really become one of the most essential 

 instruments in forwarding the general progress of knowledge. 



For example, if Quenstedt had given a new generic name to every 

 natural series of the Ammonites, which he has so admirably fol- 

 lowed out in his grand work on the Jura, there would have been no 

 occasion for the criticisms made above. Paleontologists would as 

 long ago as the publication of Die Cephalopoden, in 1846, have 

 begun to consider them in their natural relations, and now it would 

 have been an act of scientific heresy to think of the Ammonites as 

 anything but a large and important group divisible into many families 

 and genera. Quenstedt's researches failed in this one technical point 

 of apparently no essential value, and one which even now he would 

 probably treat with the contempt born of the habit of contemplating 

 more ifnportant things. I consider this, however, to have been a 

 very unfortunate mistake, since it is owing to this, and this alone, 

 that Aug. Quenstedt's work has not been universally known as the 

 only one in Paleontology which at that early period adopted the 

 only true system of classification, and fearlessly recognized the varia- 

 bility of forms and their passage into each other. He studied them 

 in their development, adult characteristics, and even their diseases, 

 and although all his observations were directed towards the defini- 

 tion of strata, struck the key note of true zoological classification in 

 his work on the Jura, p. 20, where he writes, "aber der Fortschritt 

 der Wissenschaft besteht nicht bios ira Trennen, sondern auch im 



richtigen Verbinden, und letzteres ist entschieden das Schwieri- 



gere." His collection and his published works exhibit a knowledge 

 of this group and their true relations which has never been equalled, 

 and which must form the basis of all future classifications, and as 



