Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/15

Rh genus or species the first name applied to it and no other. The first name, once properly given is sacred because it is the right name. All other later names, whatever their appropriateness in meaning, are wrong names in taxonomy. In science, of necessity, a name is a name without any necessary signification. For this reason and for the further avoidance of confusion, it should remain as it was originally spelled by the author, obvious misprints aside, regardless of all possible errors in classical form or meaning. This rule is now generally adopted in America, because attempts at classical purism have simply produced confusion. The names in use are properly written in Latin or in latinized Greek, the Greek forms being usually preferred as generic names, the Latin adjectives for names of species. Many species are named in honor of individuals, these names bearing usually the termination of the Latin genitive, as Sebastodes gillii, Liparis agassizi. In recent custom all specific names in zoology are written with the small initial; all generic names with the capital.

One class of exceptions must be made to the law of priority. No generic name can be used twice among animals, and no specific name twice in the same genus. Thus the name Diabasis has to be set aside in favor of the next name, Hæmulon, because Diabasis was earlier used for a genus of beetles. The specific name, Pristipoma humile, is abandoned, because there was already a humile in the genus Pristipoma.

In the system of Linnæus, a genus corresponded roughly to the modern conception of a family. Most of the primitive genera contained a great variety of forms, as well as usually some species belonging to other groups dissociated from their real relationships.

As greater numbers of species have become known, the earlier genera have undergone subdivision until in the modern systems almost any structural character not subject to intergradation and capable of exact definition is held to distinguish a genus. As the views of the value of characters are undergoing constant change, and as different writers look upon them from different points of view, or with different ideas of convenience, we must have constant changes in the boundaries of genera. This brings constant changes in the scientific names, although the same specific name should be used whatever the generic name to which it may be attached. We may illustrate these changes and the 'burden of synonymy' as well by a concrete example. The horned trunk-fish or cuckold of the West Indies was first recorded by Lister in 1686 in the descriptive phrase above quoted. Artedi in 1738 recognized that it belonged with other trunk-fishes in a group he called Ostracion treating the word as a Latin masculine although derived from a Greek neuter diminutive (ὀδτραχἱον, a small box). This, to be strictly classic, he should have written Ostracium, but he preferred a partly Greek form to the Latin one. In the Nagg's Head Inn in London, Artedi saw a