ined 106 illustrations by the author. It described many new species that Latham had discovered in various museums and collections. In that work, as with Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, he did not attach importance to the names of the species that he described. Later, Latham realised that only the use of the Linnean binomial system would give him the honour of originating a species' scientific name. Thus he published Index Ornithologicus in 1790, in which he specified a binomial name for all the species he had previously described. However, it was too late, because Johann Friedrich Gmelin had already published his own version of Linnaeus' Systema Naturæ, in which he had given a scientific name to Latham's species. Taking into account the rules of nomenclature, Gmelin's work has priority. Nevertheless, there are around eighty bird species for which Latham's 1790 publication is cited as the authority. They include the emu, the black swan, the hyacinth macaw, the sulphur-crested cockatoo, and the noisy friarbird. He had a supplement to Index Ornithologicus, containing additional scientific names, published as Supplementum Indicis Ornithologici in 1801. It is the authority for around seventy species of bir