Recent Literature. 
169 
forms as were not known to intergrade, he says : “ To our mind, this 
forcibly illustrates the inefficiency of the Linnaean nomenclature as an 
adequate method of formulating our knowledge. It answered when a 
thing was either square or else it was round, — when species were held for 
fixed facts as separate creations; but now that we know a thing may 
be neither square nor round, but something between, it is lamentably 
defective. Not many years hence we trust naturalists will have discarded 
it for some better method of notation ; and then the wonder will be that 
we advanced so far -with such a stumbling-block in the way. Who shall 
say how much the advance of chemistry, for instance, or of philosophic 
anatomy, has been facilitated, or indeed rendered possible, by the inven- 
tion of expressive symbols and apt formulas, or how much of the acknowl- 
edged confusion in zoology and botany flows from our cramped method of 
expressing our views ? If we must continue to use a tool so blunt and un- 
handy as the binomial nomenclature, all cannot be expected to use it with 
equal skill and effect.” In the same connection, in referring to the im- 
portance of “ recognizing geographical and some other differentiations by 
name,” he adds, “ Not necessarily a specific name, but some one addi- 
tional word, with or without the sign 4 var.,’ that shall stamp the form we 
wish to signalize. Perhaps this would be a judicious middle course, most 
applicable to the present state of the science. ” * In less than a year 
from this time a trinomial system was adopted, with the compromise of 
the sign “ var.” interposed between the specific and varietal names, by 
the three writers above named, by at least one of whom the necessity of 
such a procedure was formally argued. But even much earlier than this 
11 varieties ” had more or less frequently been recognized by writers on 
American birds, even in the sense of geographical forms (notably by 
Professor Baird, 1858 to 1866) but probably not in the sense of incipient 
species, in which they were now avowedly recognized. From this date 
(1872) the practice became general, as is witnessed by almost every work or 
faunal list relating; to the birds of the western half of the continent that ’ 
has since appeared. In 1876, in referring to the changes in the nomen- 
clature of North American ornithology that had marked the few years 
immediately preceding that date, the present writer thus referred to the 
subject of trinomials : “ The next step, and apparently a wholly logical 
one in the revolution, will doubtless be the general adoption of a tri- 
nomial system of nomenclature for the more convenient expression of 
the relationship of what are conventionally termed ‘ subspecies,’ so that 
we may write, for instance, Falco communis anatuni in place of the more 
cumbersome Falco communis subsp. anatum. This system is already, in 
fact, to some extent in use here, though looked upon with strong disfavor 
by our Transatlantic fellow-workers, who seem as yet not fully to under- 
stand the nature of the recent rapid advance ornithology has made in 
* Amer. Nat., Vol. V, p. 373, and foot-note to p. 371. 
