From: Curtis Clark (jcclark@mockfont.com)
Date: Wed Dec 17 2003 - 03:06:32 EST
on 2003-12-16 15:27 Peter Kirk wrote:
> I'm no expert on this...
I am. :-)
> but I thought that species could be transferred
> from genus to genus as knowledge advances.
As John pointed out, the epithet stays the same.
> And presumably obvious
> spelling mistakes are corrected (contrast "FHTORA" in U+1D0C5), or are
> you saying that if the first publication had "Brontosuarus" as a typo
> this error would remain for ever?
There are errors and then there are errors. Some are correctable, some
are not, and botanists and zoologists have different rules about this.
An example that's not entirely OT: There was a Russian physician with
the last name Эшшолц - a "cyrillicization" of his German family name
Escholtz. His name was commonly written then and today in German form as
Johann Friedrich Eschscholtz, the schsch reduplication being a
reflection of the Cyrillic spelling. He Latinized (language, not
alphabet) his name (a common occurrence among naturalists) to Eschscholzius.
He was physician to the Kotzebue expedition from Russia to (among other
places) California; the ship's naturalist was Adelbert von Chamisso
(author of _Peter Schlemiel_). Chamisso and Eschscholtz were fast
friends (and some accounts imply that they were lovers). Chamisso named
several new species of organisms for his friend, including the
California poppy.
In the original description of the California poppy, he named it
_Eschscholzia californica_, making the genus name the feminine form of
Eschscholtz's Latinized name (this is a common occurrence). In the
caption of the illustration of the plant, however, it was spelled
_Eschholzia_. But for over a century afterwards, most botanists and
horticulturists spelled the genus _Eschscholtzia_, assuming that both
spellings in the original description were typographic errors.
But the rules of nomenclature are very specific about which types of
errors can be corrected, and, since there is no obvious "correct"
spelling of Escholtz, *the spelling that accompanied the original
description must stand*, and the plant is correctly _Eschscholzia
californica_.
-- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Mockingbird Font Works http://www.mockfont.com/
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