22 
Psyche 
[March 
There are three bases of agreement: — 
AUTHORITY 
PRIORITY 
JUDGMENT 
The assignment of names may be put in the hands of 
some Authority. During Linnaeus’s life, by a sort of general 
consent he was recognized as the Authority: when he used 
a name that name stood, when he saw fit to change it, the 
world changed too. And when Linnaeus died, his successor, 
Fabricius, stepped into his place (I am speaking of ento- 
mology). Fabricius seems to have claimed this mantle of 
authority, but it was not unanimously conceded to him, and 
as disputed authority without power is no authority, this 
policy fell into abeyance until the formation of our Inter- 
national Commission. 
The second obvious plan was Priority. Let the oldest name 
rule, beginning with the book in which Linnaeus first proposed 
this scheme of things . 1 This sounds excellent, but complica- 
tions soon arose. Let us consider merely the “trivial name.” 
Two workers recognize or discover a species about the same 
time in different countries. Each gives it a trivial name, 
and each name gets currency in its own country before it is 
recognized that both are the same creature. Then the ques- 
tion is raised: Which is prior? If there is doubt, and there 
well may be, each country favors its own worker, and we 
have two or more rival names. 
At the time that Fabricius retired from the field we have 
a further complicating factor that we can appreciate better 
than the last generation. That was the time of the Napo- 
leonic wars, and literature did not always travel freely. Also 
there was a nationalism that interfered with the application 
of the law of priority when a national difference of usage 
appeared. We have one outstanding case in the Lepidoptera, 
where all these difficulties fell together — Hubner. Hubner 
was a rival of the authority of Fabricius; his works were 
irregularly used and carelessly dated if at all; and he was 
iFor a long period the tendency was to reserve Linnaeus’ own 
authority, and begin the rule of priority at the point where Linnaeus 
laid it down. 
