THE BIRDS OF SINGAPORE ISLAND 
the authors of these lists in deference to the public demand gave 
"English and understandable names" to all their birds. 
We were once rather amused at the dilemma of an ornitho- 
logical friend of ours. He had just discovered a new species of 
bnlbiil from Siam and, 1 suppose, the description took him 
about five minutes to write out. But the editor of the journal 
to whom the description was to be sent always insisted on the 
iiicKision of popular names in accepted papers and thus the 
diflictilty be^^an and three pipes kter the two of us, for my 
assistance in this g^rave matter had been invoked, were no 
nearer to the finding of a suitable name for a Siamese bull>ul. 
Bui bill s are so numerous in the East that all the more or less 
reasonable names were used up! The situation was met by 
inserting a not altogether proper name in the manuscript which 
as we anticipated the editor noticed and altered to his taste* 
We regret that the same plan of campaign is not likcjy to 
answer in this book and we have therefore done our best to 
provide siiitahle English names for all the birds mentioned, 
maintaininitr at the same that it is just as easy and far more 
convenient to call birds by technical names (although perhaps 
some of us pronounce them rather badly) as otherwise. In 
this application of names we have been as honest as possilde 
and have not, like the curator of a small museum at home, who 
got over the difficulty (his committee of management said that 
he had got to provide "readable" names on the specimens) 
somewhat in this fashion — H cm k crests surdkius or the ''Sordid 
Hemicercus", Ct}rydo}i sitniairatius or the Sumatran Corydon, 
Cacomant'ts sepuhhraUs or the Grave-like Cacomantis, etc. 
The general idea underlying the bmomial (or better, bino- 
minal) system of nomenclature is now generally understood 
and we will not insult our readers intelligence with a disserta- 
tion ut)on the system which was formally introduced by Linn^- 
us of giving every species of animal a generic name and a 
specific name thus— Con w corojc, Cort-us corone^ Con'us 
fntgilf^i^us. Con'ttx m on edit la, these in order being the raven, 
the carrion crow, the rook and the jackdaw Chere we may 
remark that popular names are quite useful when applied to 
very well-known birds in a broad sense). 
The more recent developments in zoological nomenclature 
are not so well-known (where known in fact they are almost 
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