Beware Quinarianism

St Petersburg, 2017.

Meanwhile, today I looked at a post by Cindy Knoke with photos of hummingbirds, and because of the title of the post I went off looking for the Latin name for the birds, thinking there might be some connection.

I found out that the Latin name for hummingbirds, Trochilidae, originates from the Greek word “trochilos,” meaning a small bird.

It is more than unlikely that the Ancient Greeks used the word for hummingbirds because hummingbirds are only native to the Americas.

Sunbirds are very similar in appearance to hummingbirds, and of course there are sunbirds in Africa and the Middle East, so the Ancient Greeks might have meant them.

How much were the Ancient Greeks bent on naming everything anyway? Perhaps they just didn’t care to divide and subdivide. Perhaps any small bird was just ‘a small bird’.

Before I get to who gave the name Trochilidae to hummingbirds, there’s the following fact.

Hummingbirds are in the order Apodiformes, meaning, unfooted birds.There are three families in the order – hummingbirds, tree swifts, and swifts.

Of course they do have feet, but they cannot sit or stand because of the way their feet are built.

What are the ‘unfooted’ feet of hummingbirds like?

It turns out the while they have four toes – three pointing forward and one backward – they are small (no surprise) and positioned so that the birds can only perch and cannot walk or hop.

And just to round out the feet business, tree swifts have a backward pointing toe and true swifts only have forward facing toes.

So, now to the question of who gave the Latin name Trochilidae to hummingbirds.

Nicholas Aylward Vigors gave them that name in 1825. He was a co-founder in 1826 of the Zoological Society of London, and in 1833 he founded the forerunner of the Royal Entomological Society.

Vigors was a proponent of the Quinarian system that held that all species, families, and classes are in groups of five.

The system was abandoned in the mid 1800s in favour of actually looking at classification based on evolutionary relationships.

Until it was abandoned, I wonder how many scientists who followed it shoehorned species into families to which they did not belong because the Quinarian system said that was the way things were?

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