These are weighty words of wisdom, and it must be a matter for profound regret to all persons of thoroughly philosophical and well-balanced minds that, by the newer school of naturalists—led by an American section—they have not only been received without the attention they merit as coming from a man of Flower’s wide experience and mature judgment, but have been absolutely ignored and the principle they inculcate treated with disdain and contempt. Obscure names, frequently of the most barbarous construction and sound, have been raked up from all conceivable sources and substituted for the well-known terms adopted by Flower and many of his contemporaries; while, to make matters worse, the good old rule that no names antedating the twelfth edition of the _Systema Naturæ_ of Linnæus should be recognised in zoological literature has, so far as mammals are concerned, been treated absolutely as a dead letter. If it be asked what has been the result of thus ignoring the deliberately expressed and matured views of a judicial mind like Flower’s, and whether we are perceptibly nearer the attainment of uniformity in the matter of biological nomenclature, the reply must be that the subject is in a more unsatisfactory state than ever, and the desired end as far off. It is perfectly true, indeed, that a section of the students of the systematic side of zoology have agreed among themselves to employ only such names as they believe to be the earliest, quite irrespective of the obscurity of their origin or the rule that such names should be compounded according to classic usage. When, however, we take a broader survey of the field of biology, we find that, almost to a man, the anatomists, the palæontologists, the geologists, the evolutionists, the students of geographical distribution, and other writers who discuss the subject from aspects other than the purely systematic, adhere to the more conservative side in respect of nomenclature. Moreover, even if this were not the case, we should be but little forwarder, seeing that in works like Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ and Wallace’s _Geographical Distribution of Mammals_—which must remain classical so long as zoology lasts as a science—the older style of nomenclature is used. Consequently, even if the proposed emendations and changes were universally adopted, the names employed by these and other contemporary writers would still have to be learnt and committed to memory by all zoological students; so that, instead of one series of names, as would have been practically the case had Flower’s proposal been loyally adopted by his contemporaries and followers, we are compelled to know and remember a double series.