Anatomical Nomenclature of Echinoder ms. 7 
many respects preferable to parabasals. But it was demon- 
strated in 1878 that the parabasals or subradials of dicyclic 
Crinoids are the real basal plates, and that the plates hitherto 
called by that name are an additional element in the calyx, 
for which the name under-basals was proposed. Messrs. 
Wachsmuth and Springer adopted this change in Part I. of 
their i Revision of the Pakeocrinoidea,’ which appeared in the 
following year, and their example has been followed by five 
writers on Crinoids in the United States, including the late 
Professor Worthen himself, and two in Canada. With the 
exception of the late Professor Quenstedt all the continental 
paleontologists * who have written on Crinoids in general 
during the last decade have abandoned the use of the term 
basals for the lower ring of plates in the dicyclic base in 
favour of under-basals or infrabasals ; so that it has really 
seemed as if the rational system of nomenclature was coming 
into general use. In America, however, S. A. Miller has 
steadily declined to adopt it, and he has continued to use the 
purely empirical terminology of de Koninck. His reasons 
for this course were stated as follows in 1883 : — “ Most 
American authors, and I might say all, until quite recently, 
have called the plates, in the first ring above the column, the 
basals, and when the second exists they have called them 
subradials. Certainly no names can be easier or more ex- 
pressive. . . . The policy of changing the nomenclature may 
well be doubted, and ought not to be entered upon without 
the clearest conviction, that, by so doing, error of some kind 
is being eradicated ” t« In reply to this it was pointed out J 
that the change had been proposed expressly to avoid the 
error of giving the same name u basals ” to parts which are 
not homologous in monocyclic and in dicyclic Crinoids respec- 
tively. This argument does not seem to have produced any 
impression upon Miller ; for in the useful Catalogue of 
North American Pakeozoic fossils which he has recently 
published he still uses the term basals for the lowest plates of 
the dicyclic calyx. The confusion into which he is thus led 
* Dalmer, Fritsch, and Wagner describe the dicyclic base of Encrinus 
as composed of inner and outer basals. Neumayr used the same termin- 
ology for dicyclic Crinoids generally, with the collective names basis and 
infrabasis ; but he took especial care to point out that the former and not 
the latter is homologous with the basis of monocyclic Crinoids. 
t “ Glyptocrinus redefined and restricted, Gaurocrinus } Pycnocrinus, and 
Compsoo'inus established, and two new Species described/’ Journ. Cincinn. 
Soc. Nat. Hist. 1883, vol. vi. p. 218. 
X “ On a new Crinoid from the Southern Sea,” Phil. Trans. 1883, 
p. 932. 
