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Message: <blockquote data-quote="l_raty" data-source="post: 3083376" data-attributes="member: 24811">I find the case of <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=NUEAAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#PPA78,M1" target="_blank">the partridge</a> harder to interpret "the other way", actually. Here, Pallas did not write "Descr. Varietatis dauuricae" ("Description of a Daurian variety"), he wrote "Descr. Varietatis rupestris dauuricae" ("Description of a Daurian rupestrian variety")--thus giving a statement of both the habitat, and the range of the form. There is in fact no objective reason to regard "dauuricae" in this phrase as being more "a name" than "rupestris". (Being italicized is irrelevant, Pallas did not use italics to flag names in his texts.) What is quite striking, however, is that, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=NUEAAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#PPA80,M1" target="_blank">two pages further down in the text</a>, where he referred to the form in question while discussing the variation of his TETRAO rufa, he used neither words, but instead called it "Perdix sibirica" ("the Siberian partridge")... Thus he himself doesn't appear to have "conventionally used" any of these words where he needed "to denote" the form.Usually, Pallas' intents are quite clear, actually; so I'm rather convinced that Mlíkovský's reading is correct, and that Pallas never really intended these words "to denote and identify" the Varietates he described. In any case, he certainly failed to use them in a way that would clearly support such an intent. Now, well: we might of course decide that there are advantages in pretending that Pallas had an intent, where he most likely did not--this is a rather distinct issue.It remains, though, that if the entire discussion in Dickinson et al. 2014 rests on applying the Code to determine whether "the name" "Muscicapa grisola var. dauurica Pallas, 1811" is to be regarded as subspecific or infrasubspecific under the Code, this fails entirely to answer the concerns that have been expressed. These concerns are not that the name might be unavailable or infrasubspecific; these concerns are that "the name" "Muscicapa grisola var. dauurica Pallas, 1811" might be Dement'ev's invention, and simply not exist. Not even as an unavailable or as an infrasubspecific name.(Note that this should in no way be interpreted as suggesting a general problem touching all names introduced with a "Var." term or equivalent. A variety can certainly be named. But one should perhaps realize that not every word that follows "Var." in a Latin text needs to be "a name" per se.)</blockquote>

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