1921 .] Letters, Extracts, and Notes. 345 
be welcomed by any ornithologist. It must be remembered 
that a multitude of races have been named of late years, 
yet the number of species inhabiting, say, a continent like 
Africa is known now to be considerably less than was 
supposed ten years ago. The last phase, as Mr. Loomis 
says, now approaches, for the whole of the geographical 
variations of many species are now known, and the question 
arises “ of what scientific value are these variations ? ” 
Well, it seems to us personally that trinomialism supplies 
a handy (not invariably handy) adjective which is inter¬ 
nationally understood, and which designates birds from a 
certain locality in a short and concise way. By the recog¬ 
nition of subspecies we can also map out migration-routes 
of birds from any given locality, and can note the effect of 
environment on any given species throughout its range. 
But beyond this we venture to suggest that the value of 
subspecies is small, and that their taxonomic value is, 
in many cases, nil. 
On the other hand, to those who accept in toto the 
Darwinian theory — or what is commonly accepted as 
the Darwinian theorj"—and all that it implies, all sub¬ 
species will appear of great value as “ incipient species.” 
Now, for our part it has always been a matter of the 
greatest., difficulty to imagine how a geographical form, 
which, in fact, is already a species, can be termed an 
er incipient” one: for surely if any given specific group 
has, we will say, x forms or variations, those x forms 
have all equal specific entity, differing slightly or super¬ 
ficially by the increment or decrement of some small 
characteristics. Indeed, if we believe with ultra-Darwinians 
in the “ little by little )} theory of evolution, there is no 
obvious reason why the “ typical form 33 of any specific 
group should not be just as much an incipient species as its 
most distant geographical race. 
Speaking for ourselves, however, we no longer believe in 
the “ little by little” theory of evolution, nor incidentally 
in “ Natural Selection,” except in its purely selective, as 
opposed to creative, sense—and even in this sense we feel 
2a 
SER. XI.-VOL. III. 
