ANIMALS’ NAMES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 October 1939, Page 7

ANIMALS’ NAMES

INTERNATIONAL ZOOLOGICAL DICTIONARY. QUARTER OF A MILLION ENTRIES. A notable work approaches completion this month with the issue of an international Zoological Dictionary comprising the names of 250.000 forms of animal life. It is the fruit of long co-operation between the naturalists of all nations, and lias the London Zoological Society for its with Dr Sheffield Ncave. of the Imperia! Institute of Entomology, as director. The number of entries —a quarter of a million —sounds prodigious. yeti magnificent as is the work achieved. i'.‘ but touches the fringe of the subject. Living things remain in millions of species for the scientists to name and describe in their books. Naturalists on their travels are as anxious to discover a new species as travellers are anxious to discover a' new island or a new people. But such j a find cannot be called new until a type specimen has been sent to theNatural History Museum for comparison with all known forms of the class | of life to which it is related. The most rigorous investigation is I necessary over the work or we should have the same variety of lite existing under many names in various parts o! a continent or in separate continents. We have to group similarities into species, then groups of species infogenera, groups of genera into families; these again into orders, orders into classes and classes into divisions, called phyla, into which the other groups are assembled as main divisions of the tree of life.

Men of learning have- been at the work for years toiling to map the scheme of living things. Accuracy is essential; in not one case must there be a repetition of a name, nor must there be a new name for what is just a new variety of an established species. Knowledge is/power in zoology. The instructed naturalist can tell at a glance which is a poisonous snake, which an innocent one; he can identify the gnat that devours and destroys the germs that cause deadly malaria and the gnat which nourishes those germs in its digestive organs and so passes them on to slay human beings. Just as infallibly he can detect the flea that carries the bacillus that has stricken mankind age after age with plague. All our frightful Black Death epidemics arose from the bite of one species of flea. The new work, which will be in four volumes is a step on the way towards a library that will some day embrace the greater part of animal creation.