UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
BUREAU OF BIOLOGICAL SURVEY 
WASHINGTON, D. C. 
February 8, 1909. 
Dear Brewster: 
It is always unpleasant to find onesself a minority of one. 
For this reason your letter about the type of Anas obscu ra is 
peculiarly gratifying to me. The views you express in this case 
are precisely those I have always held and stood for, but up to 
the present time I have received no support from the A. 0. U. 
Committee on Nomenclature. 
Let me cite a case in mammals: In 1837 Bachman gave the 
name sy j,vaticu s to our common cottontail rabbit of the eastern 
United States, and when the cottontail came to be split up into 
subspecies the name was very properly restricted by Bangs to the 
Carolinian form. This name svlvaticus stood for half a century 
as the universally accepted name of the typical eastern cottontail. 
Then the fact came to light that the name sylva ticus was preoccupied 
for a European rabbit. This being the case, Oldfield Thomas pro¬ 
posed the name mallurus as <K substitute for svlvaticus . This, 
according to my mode of thinking, in no way disturbs the type or 
central form, which is a thing,not a name. The logical course 
therefore,it seems to me,is to accept malluru s as the type in 
place of svlva ticus, attaching the various subspecies to mallurus . 
But this is exactly what has not been done. Allen in 1890 des¬ 
cribed the subspecies floridanus. and this name for some reason 
which I never quite understood has been accepted by Bangs, Miller, 
Allen, and others as the central form in place of mallurus (=old 
svlvaticus) . so that the name of the Carolinian cottontail stands 
