But what if the arrival entry cannot be found? What if the alien cannot remember the name of the vessel, or other important facts relating to his entry, and thus give the necessary clews for the search? What if it was his misfortune to arrive at a port after the law took effect and before the registry system was in operation? Both the Immigration and the Naturalization Service take a good deal of pains to care for such situations; but frequently without success. All this involves delay, not only vexatious and discouraging, but likely to prove fatal in the case of an alien whose declaration is at the edge of expiration. Not infrequently an application for certificate of arrival is bandied back and forth between the two Bureaus for months. There was a case in 1919 in which the alien described himself as having arrived on a certain date and vessel at New York; the immigration records showed no such arrival, and, what was worse, no such vessel entering New York at that time. After long delay it turned out that the alien did arrive on that date and vessel, but at _Boston_, whence, upon admission, he came by a domestic coastwise vessel from Boston to New York. Many other cases are by no means so simple. A petition accepted for filing without the requisite certificate of arrival is regarded as incomplete, and may not be completed subsequently by attachment of the certificate, but must be marked “spoiled”; the four dollars paid as fee may be returned to the petitioner by the clerk, or can be applied to the filing of a new and sufficient petition. It has been the practice of the Bureau of Naturalization, after it appears impossible to find record of the applicant’s admission to the country, to refer him to the nearest immigration inspector for what is known as a _nunc pro tunc_ inspection, for the purpose of satisfying the inspector that the alien should not be deported as “unlawfully present.” If the inspector is satisfied, he issues what is known as a “provisional certificate of arrival,” whose acceptance as sufficient for purposes of naturalization is subject to the discretion of the court. This would appear a reasonable way out; but in the case of petitioners living a very long distance from the office of an immigration inspector, it involves an extra, and perhaps prohibitively expensive, journey to the distant city for that purpose alone, and this difficulty has in fact been to some extent relieved by permission to handle such cases by correspondence and affidavits. THE VEXATIOUS QUESTION OF NAMES