With respect to specific synonymy, many causes conduce to it; namely, an imperfect description which cannot be clearly recognized, reducing it to that category, with a mark of interrogation appended; subsequent description when want of tact has not discerned the identity of the old one; indolence in looking about for works upon the same subject; inability to obtain access to books wherein they may be described, owing either to their costliness or to their obscurity, or by lying buried in some collapsed journal, or the poverty of our public libraries, etc. etc. But however thus lost sight of, or wilfully ignored, the name still retains vital elasticity, for the describer has not thereby lost his rights, but revives to them with all due justice upon the cessation of this coma. The really culpable among such describers are those who neglect to look around them to ascertain what has been done, and this course is sometimes illicitly adopted to obtain a fleeting and meretricious fame, by the description of ostensibly new species, which critical investigators soon detect to have been long since known and very ably described. Thus, a complete synonymy, which can almost only come within the province of a monograph, would give, chronologically, the entire history of a species under all the names it has been known by in the several works in which it has been published. Nature is so uniform and stable that Aristotle’s descriptions can be clearly recognized, therefore there is no fear that whatever may have been synonymously, but yet correctly recorded of the economy of a species, can possibly be lost when once registered in the archives of science. The working out of a correct synonymy is an ungrateful task of much labour, for few appreciate it, and not many use it, although when thoroughly elaborated it is so extremely valuable. A further rule in nomenclature is, that the generic name must always be a substantive; and it is always desirable that the specific name should be an adjective. In the event of the imposition of a proper name, which is sometimes done to record a private friendship, but improperly so, for it is a distinction due only to promoters of the science, the genitive form must be adopted. The next grade in ascent from the species is invariably the GENUS, for subgenera, like varieties in species, are not uniformly present, but are mere contingencies, even if they do properly exist.