There is in fact no rule at all that associates reading to authorship --
not even co-authorship. (If, say, Hartert had read a text unambiguously
attributed to Hellmayr alone, this text being read by Hartert would not
have changed its authorship.)
Yet, minutes and meeting reports can be extremely blurry in terms of
authorship, for several reasons. E.g., in the present case:
- The author(s) of *the description* is/are in fact not identified at
all. (We are given (1) the name of a reader, and (2) the names of two
persons responsible for the name; neither *needs to* be identical to the
author(s) of the descriptive text.)
- Note that Hartert is talked of in the third person in the last
paragraph of the text ("Hartert has compared the specimen collected by
Natterer" [etc.]); this suggests the printed text was different from the
text that was actually read -- possibly paraphrased / rewritten by a
third person acting as an editor.
The Code has this:
50.2. Authorship of names in reports of meetings. If the name of a taxon
is made available by publication in a report or minutes of a meeting,
the person responsible for the name, not the Secretary or other reporter
of the meeting, is the author of the name.
IOW: Better not to bother about all these issues. Just try to identify
who, in the minutes/report, appears responsible for the name and go with
this.
