is no uniformity in current practice, and the only attempts at uniformity have been based on purely artificial distinctions. The resolution of the terminology must take into account as a question of convenience that no category higher than the genus may be written into the nomenclature, and as a matter of fact that there are often three or four degrees of phylogenetic affinities which may be recognized below what seems to be best called a genus.
The ichthyologists believe that they have the solution in calling this lowest category a species and the second category a genus, thereby making their order the equivalent of many a genus among insects. I interpret the mammalogists to mean that they call a Mendelian race a variety, and the fundamental taxonomic unit a subspecies, which they imply is an incipient “species” (their next category). The botanists, as nearly as I can perceive, call their lowest unit either a variety or a species, depending upon its remoteness from the native heath of the botanist and his field of experience.
I am at a loss for a solution of this difficulty. It seems unreasonable to expect that this first category will ever be called anything but a species by biologists who are not systematists, and in that sense I shall use the word in general discussion in this study. It will be impossible to adopt this meaning in our system of classification without inventing a new name for a category between this and the genus, and I have not the temerity to propose such a name while taxonomists are as far removed from biologic realities as the codes of nomenclature and much current systematics would indicate. Consequently, in the systematic portion of this paper I have adopted the term variety for the category which, after all, fulfills the species concept. I can only plead that I am conscious of the inevitable confusion this involves, and desirous of making amends as soon as some one proposes a solution—but I shall look for a solution that will coördinate biologic concepts of species with questions of convenience in systematic botany and zoölogy.
