Naming and Necessity: Sherborn’s Context

Nomina si pereunt, perit et cognitio rerum

“Names are the foundation of knowledge: and unless they have a ‘a name’ as well as a ‘local habitation’ with us, the zoological treasures that we so highly prize might almost as well have been left to perish in their native deserts or forests, as have grown mouldy in our drawers or repositories. But when once an animal subject is named and described, it becomes a possession for ever, and the value of every individual specimen of it, even in a mercantile view, is enhanced.”

William Kirby, Foundational Address of the Zoological Club, 1823.

Language and Meaning

in the 1842 Rules of Zoological Nomenclature, drafted by a committee headed by Hugh Edwin Strickland (1811-1853)

Early draft of the “Strickland Rules” with corrections

(Courtesy of Zoological Museum, Cambridge University)

The overarching priority

of priority

John Edward Gray (1800-1875)and the types of things at the British Museum.

Opposing the Rules

A barnacle built for two (authorities).

Charles Darwin’s A monograph on the sub-class Cirripedia

(The first monograph to closely follow the 1842 Rules and make use of the catalogues and specimens of the BM)

The Landscape of American exceptionalism:

Trinomalism and the resurgence of the trouble over meaning and language.

Joel A. Allen 1838-1921 Elliot Coues 1842-1899

Confrontation at the British Museum (Natural History) -1884

-- language, meaning, reform and authority

-- who rules?

1890 -- Sherborn announces in Nature the plans for

Index Generum et Specierum Animalium

-- binomials only

-- alphabetised by species

-- strict priority back to 12th edition of Linnaeus