NeW YORK SHELL CLUB NOTES No. 23 September 1977 Page 5 
our Latin letters. But there are no ru i 
these names and Tucker Abbott's adden aeons e pis ai of 
nounces, a personal opinion. God knows what the Russians and Japa- 
nese do with the pronunciation of these names: Tellina agilis, Mer- 
cenaria, etc. (Terrina agiris, Myertsyenyareeya 7). But Tet's not 
Taugh. We Engli sh users are bad enough. Do we say playna or plahna 
ilsbry-ee or pilsbry-eye, tell-eye-na or tell-ee-na, etc. We drive 
a German, French, : panish and Italian malacologists nuts. But 
sometimes we get punished. Often place names or proper names are 
used to form a zoological name, thus przevalski, kuschakewitzi 
nakayasui, ufyalvyanus, popouwelensis, m aensis etc. etc. (all 
ese are names actually given. 
But we're not entirely guiltless. What, for instance, will a French- 
man or a German or a Japanese do with the name whoii, given by Dr. 
Ruth Turner of Harvard to honor the Woods Hole Oceanographic Insti- 
tute? What do we say: hooi, whoai? And the others: v-haw-ee, vaw- 
hee? A little later I'll give a real zinger of a name, which for- 
Funately was not allowed by the International Commission. 
Which brings me to my second and last subject. Yes, there is a con- 
stitution for zoologists and a supreme court to hear cases and make 
decisions -- called opinions in our craft. The constitution is 
called the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature with arti- 
eles and sections and a whole slew of amendments and legal decisions. 
The court is called the International Commission on Zoological Nomen- 
clature and meets once every ten years to issue its decrees (opinions). 
There is almost as much to say about this court as there is to say 
about our own supreme court in Washington. So I won't bother. But 
I ought to make just a few remarks about its functions. 
I can do this best by first saying what the court does not do. The 
most important point is that it has absolutely nothing Fo do with 
zoology or biology as such; this it has to leave to the experts in 
their many fields. Its function is purely legalistic and deals only 
with names and words and its decisions always end up proclaiming that 
this name is to be used and not that other. It even issues a list 
of available names at regular intervals. 
Here again it might be well to delimit precisely the field of the 
systematist and the nomenclaturist. Rudolf Richter in his commentary 
on the code (1948) puts it well. He wrote that what actually happens 
is that a scientist, working in his tiny little niche, finds some- 
thing which he decides is worthy of nominal distinction, whether as 
a genus, subgenus, species or subspecies or whatever. Now he turns, 
figuratively of course, to the nomenclaturist and asks him to please 
give him a good, clear name which is free of all sorts of objections. 
The nomenclaturist now turns to his vast file card and says, "Look 
here, you can use this name safely enough, it's no synonym or homonym 
of anything." And the function of the International Commission is 
limited to the second part of this little imaginary conversation 
only. Thus the International Commission has no right to determine 
if something is good enough to be a species or only a subspecies or 
nothing. Ald that is the field of the zoological experts who will 
fight it out in published articles or face to face in conventions. 
The ICZN Se roves only if problems regarding the names themselves 
arise and then only if someone intervenes and submits a brief. It 
cannot take up cases by itself, just like our supreme court. 
The ICZN has another important function which our supreme court does 
