ADAM'S FIRST TASK.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 877, 25 July 1910, Page 5

ADAM'S FIRST TASK.

STILL UNFINISHED. THE DEADLINESS OF NAMING. (By J.QX) Fully as I recognise the propriety of attaching my vagrant fancies to something "topical," I seem unable to begin on the present occasion with anything more recent than an in the life of Adam. It was in the earliest and almost the happiest period of our first parent's career that the animals came before him to bo named. They approached (if we may accept thn picturesque supposition of Milton) in pairs, a male and female of each kind of beast and bird, and bowed respectfully. Adam "named them and understood their nature."

The practice begun so early is still carried on, for Adam's descendants require to speak of many things that he knew nothing about. Scarcely an issue of the daily papers is without some reference to a naming, a re-namiug, or a settling of the signification of names. ' Glancing over The Dominion, I noticethat Jlr. Buddo has proposed that either llavelock or Havelock North shall obligingly cease to be so and call itself Lucknow; that "the New Zealand Labour Party" has finally decided to be thus entitled; that sixteen Roseneath ratepayers want the Oriental Bay tramcars to be labelled "Roseneath cars"; that Sir Joseph Ward has given a sort of freshness to 'the Estimates by describing them as an "interesting document"; that our gift Dreadnought is to lie the "New Zealand/' instead of the "Zealandia"; that Mr. -Millar will introduce . legislation to enable industrial unions to change their official designations without losing the benefits of their awards; that the-Court of Appeal has to decide how much of this terrestrial ball is denoted by the tern? ' Wingfield Street I shall not venture upon the eccentricity of objecting to such an ancient and prevailing habit, but, on the general principle that both sides of a question should be heard, I submit that the art and practice of naming is accompanied by some real evils.

If Adam really said, as Milton reports, "I named them and understood theil nature," he was putting the cart before the horse. To understand must come first; -naming may follow. The cart of nomenclature, put down in front of the horse of apprehension, is very apt to bring it to a standstill. A freshly-seen object, a newly-gTasped idea, fills the mind with wonder. It suggests a multitude of thoughts, aspirations, "quickcoming fancies." It opens long vistas, spreads wide horizons, lures us to shining heights. We name it, or, worse, are informed that it has been named already. Then it contracts. It is wrapped up, la belled, put on the shelf. It is dead. The more complete the naming, th< more perfect the death. Perhaps the most accurate, comprehensive, and minute system of nomenclature yet devised is the botanical. Collectors, observers, microscopists, book-students, for generations have toiled to it up. But what did Shelley care for this when he saw, in his wayside vision,

"Daisies, those pearled Arctnri of tha earth, The constellated flower that 'never sets," or Burns when he chid his plough lor turning up the "wee, modest crimsontipped flower," or Chaucer, when he rose before the dawn of a May morning to sea the daisy open, lay through the sunny hours upon the small, sweet grass to watch it, went back at dusk to mark its shutting-up, recognised it mingling with ■the good women of his dream, and again disturbed the dew to greet it before the sun? I think Chaucer, Burns, and Shelley understood the daisy better than the. people who . denominate it "bellis perennis," and describe it like this— "Bellis T.—Flowers fertile or. partly sterile, 2-morphous; the radial female . . .; corolla ligulate, open entire or minutely 2-4-dentate, sometimes shortened; the discal hermaphrodite; corolla regular tubular; limb tubular or more or less broadly Gampanulate, more or less. elongate, •• 4,' 5-dentate." That is only, half—merely a sample. It is sad to think that individuals to whose withered minds that sort of' compilation is dear and satisfying may onca have'sat' on the roadside grass, in sweet, too-distant childhood, hanging daisychains about each other's neck.

Even Wordsworth, whose faith it wan "that every flower enjoys the air it breathes," could not have imagined th< proudest peony or sturdiest thistlo fetching a single breath under such a masa of sterile, ligulate, elongate verbiage. Bagehot, by way of heightening his praise of that "experiencing nature" which he showed to nave been so fully possessed by Shakespeare, sketched its opposite—the type of mind which comprises "a kind of dry schedule or catalogue. of the universe." Such a man, he considered, was like a bookkeeper whose knowledge begins and ends with th( headings in his ledger.

"Take his opinion of Baron Rothschild, he will say: Tes, he keeps an account' with us'; of Humphrey Brown: Tes, we have that account, too.'"

"A man may study butterflies and for. get that they are beautiful," says Bagehot a little further on. Could be have been present at the last meeting of the Wellington Philosophical Society, he would certainly have applauded Mr. James's protest against the minute exactitudes of the lepidopterists. Perhaps wo owe u great deal to the classifying mind. If so, the great, even though unconscious, sacrifices which it makes must increase its claim on our gratitude. In causing the birds and butterflies, the ' flowers and. trees_ to . seem dead, it diminishes its own life. Yet some of those who have advanced thr cause of science have been as much alivi as anybody. Huxley wrote of himself i "Notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper business, I am afraid there is'very little of the genuine naturalist in me. I never collected anything, and species work was always a burden to Die; what I cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business, the working out of the wonderful unity in plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse livjng constructions, and the modifications of similar apparatuses to servo diverse ends."

Such a man as that—delighting m "wonderful unity", and merely bored by .tiny differences—must be counted, not with the classifieatory hexapod- or other -ologists of Jlr. James's fuimination, but with the poets, the children and other ordinary people. ■

The habit of defining, classifying, and denominating—l will not say naming, lest I should seem to accuse Adam, who never went too far with it—does' its deadly work also when applied directly to human beings. There is a sort of denominating which is an announcement— and, therefore, an emphasising and hardening—of limitations. A man generally begins it himself. Ho declares that he is some sort of an "-ist," and so gets into the large or little cell oLan "-ism." Ho friends are only too nsdy to lock , the door, and admire him through the grating: It. was long ago remarked that parents ought to give their children pleasant and sensible names that will, not afterwards hinder them in any honest career, but we should remember that, even when we are grown up, we keep on naming and renaming each other. Excepting some nicknames, I suppose that with ourselves, as with the flowers,- the most accurate names are the most hurtful. Even if there v;ere .no arbitration awards afreoting that industrial unit now legally described as an "under-rate worker," ho could hardly thrive so well as whon ho was just a "handy man." Lot Us be slow to name each other, and quick to change the names. There is little profit in tying up ourselves and our friends in neat and permanent parcels. The wife men who built a hedye round the cuckoo got' no more for their pains than the fools who, though they raked' fruitlessly at the moon's reflection, mistaking it for a cheese, really did sec in tho waysido puddle somothing which others might not have noticed*