168 
Recent Literature. 
sandvichens'is and fasciatci in place of savanna and melodia , respectively, 
for the Savanna and Song Sparrows. He also seems to have permanently 
adopted the generic name Asia for Otus , but to have abandoned Nisits for 
A ccipiter. 
In respect to the designation of incipient species, Mr. Rid gw ay uni- 
formly adopts the system advocated by him in his paper on the use of 
trinomials in zoological nomenclature in the present number of the Bulletin 
(anted, pp. 129 -134), and practically introduced by him two years since 
in his Report on the “ Ornithology of the Fortieth Parallel,” and in his ac- 
count of Mrs. Maxwell’s Colorado collection (Field and Forest, Vol. II, p. 
194 et seq.). Mr. Ridgway, in his discussion of a third term in zoological 
nomenclature, raises no dead issue, although the necessities of the case 
have already practically forced a decision of the question, so far as this 
country is concerned. The “ American school” of ornithology, and, we 
may add, nearly all American writers on vertebrate zoology, and some on 
Invertebrates, is a unit on the matter of the general principle involved, 
though varying slightly as to details of expression. The necessity of 
a distinction between forms trenchantly defined and those which are con- 
spicuously unlike in their extreme phases of development, but which 
obviously intergrade, as insisted on by Mr. Ridgway, faithfully reflects, we 
believe, the feeling and the experience of American ornithologists. The 
writer of the present review in 1871 opposed* the recognition by binomial 
names of forms known to intergrade, on the ground that thereby the facts 
of the case would fail of proper recognition, since no distinction would 
thus be made between intergrading forms and trenchantly separated con- 
generic species, and that a recognition of the laws of geographical varia- 
tion and a statement of the phases wide-ranging species are prone to 
manifest at particular localities, and under certain climatic condiiions of 
environment, would sufficiently meet all requirements. This position, 
however, he very soon abandoned, and in the following year formally 
recognized, by a third term, a considerable number of intergrading 
forms among North American birds as geographical races, as was 
almost simultaneously done by Dr. Coues and Mr. Ridgway.f To 
Dr. Coues, however, is due the credit of suggesting, if not indeed of actu- 
ally advocating, the adoption of a trinomial system of nomenclature as 
necessary to a proper recognition of geographical races or incipient spe- 
cies. In referring, as early as August, 1871, to what seemed to him must 
be the evil results that would follow from recognizing as species only such 
* Bull. Mus. Comp. Zook, Vol. II, pp. 242-250, April, 1871. 
t See Coues, Revision of the Species of Myiarchus, Proc. Acad. Nat. Sei. 
Phil., 1872, pp. 56-81, July, 1872 ; Allen, Ornith. Recon., Bull. Mus. Comp. 
Zook, III, No. 6, July, 1872 ; Coues, Key N. Am. Birds, October, 1872 ; Ridg- 
way, Relation between Color and Geographical Distribution in Birds, etc., 
Am. Jour. Sci., IV, pp. 454-460, December, 1872. 
