Reviewed by Benjamin W. Fortson IV, University of Michigan

Behind the matter-of-fact title is a magisterial marriage of zoology, intellectual and scientific history, and etymology. Many familiar examples of Linnaean binomial nomenclature are straightforward and descriptive (Homo sapiens ‘wise man’, Canis familiaris ‘household dog’); but, since new genera and species are constantly being discovered and each new name must be unique, sooner or later one runs out of Greek and Latin nouns and adjectives. Necessity is the mother of invention, and H. D. Cameron’s dictionary shows us not only how limitless—and arbitrary—nomenclatural invention can be but also how much extra-zoological information about a name’s author can be needed to understand the source of a particular genus name.

The problems are neatly summarized, with examples, in the introduction (274–75). Perhaps the most difficult genera, and the ones whose successful etymologizing by C is most worthy of admiration, are those that stem from incidental events, reading matter, words in specific editions of reference works, or other often random items on the author’s mind at the time he or she named the genus. One marvels at how C managed to figure these out and at his surely nonpareil knowledge of the habits and quirks of dozens of individual scholars of the past several centuries as well as the broader intellectual currents of their times. Examples abound of authors whose arachnology was better than their Latin or Greek (e.g. Anelosimus, Ctenus, Deinopis, Drassus, Gnaphosa, Porrhomma, Rhecostica). C’s discussions of some of these names make truly jaw-dropping reading for anyone who assumes (wrongly) that the practice of biological nomenclature has been a fiefdom reserved for a few august experts in the Classical languages.

On the theoretical linguistic side of things, it is worth noting—although it is not all that surprising—that some well-known processes of language change are at work in the history of spider-genus naming as well. That these processes are not limited to spoken language sometimes goes unappreciated, along with the corollary that educational level has nothing to do with how likely one is to commit linguistic reanalyses. C devotes the last half of his introduction to missegmentation (i.e. metanalysis), illustrating for example how the genus Lycosa, from the Greek feminine participle luksa ‘tearing like a wolf’, spawned a slew of rhyming genera in -osa and ‑cosa by authors who did not recognize the original morphology or even the morpheme boundaries.

Most of the hundreds of entries are invested with considerable detail and really amount to short essays, all lively and illuminating reading for anyone interested in the caprices of this corner of science and its practitioners and the history of names. One wishes that this work’s uniqueness does not last long. Similar works could be written about the genera in other taxonomic groups. Dinosaurs and their kin spring immediately to mind…