Vol. XVI “I 
1899 J 
Gill, Pedioccetes and Pooccetes. 
21 
True, if the assumption were true ! but 7re8tov and koiVtjs could 
be compounded into Pedioccetes and the resultant would be a word 
abundantly sanctioned by classical usage. Put in italics, the dif- 
ference between Pedioccetes and Pedioccetes is small indeed, and as 
Baird may never have seen the pattern name otherwise than in 
italics, it is no wonder that at first sight he might have mistaken 
the ce for ce and carried over his impressions into other fields. 
II. 
Baird unquestionably modelled the names Pediocaetes and 
Poocaetes after Ammocaetes. He suffered from obliquity of vision 
or mind respecting the last name and rendered it Ammoccetes in- 
stead of Ammoccetes : the name was so spelled in the ‘ Icono- 
graphic Cyclopaedia ’ (II, 207, 208, 1851). He later (1854) based 
a generic name for a true frog ( Helocaetes ) on the same model- 
Finally (1858) he coined the bird names Nephocaetes, Poocaetes and! 
Pediocaetes after the same patterns. Baird was not acquainted 
with Greek, and when he was informed that the bird names 
should have been written Nephoecetes , Pooecetes , and Pedioecetes , he 
not unnaturally assumed that his critic was correct and altered 
the names correspondingly in the table of contents. But his 
critic was not correct, and was probably ignorant of the model 
Baird had used. That model was justified by a number of 
ancient Greek names. Two of the best known names of ichthy- 
ology were classical Greek names used for genera which are the 
types of distinct families — Exocoetus and Hemerocoetes : Exo- 
coetus, misapplied by Linnaeus to the flying fishes, appears in the 
works of Theophrastus, Aelianus and Oppianus, and was a com- 
ponent of c£oj and koltyj — a fish sleeping out of the water ; 
Hemeroccetes, misapplied by Cuvier and Valenciennes, to a New 
Zealand genus of fishes, occurs as the name of an undetermined 
fish in Oppian, and was a compound of day and koitt). 
Another well-known zoological name is that of a genus of Cystig- 
nathoid batrachians — Borborocoetes : this was literally reproduced 
from a designation in the ‘ Batrachomyomachia ’ translated in Lid- 
dell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon as “ mudcoucher.” Still 
further, by a notable coincidence the name Pedioccetes is closely 
