Middle America, not Mesoamerica, is the Accurate Term for Biogeography

has been used in the recent literature of biogeography for the lands between the United States of America and South America. In the context of both science and English, “Middle America” has nearly 150 years of historical usage and much greater geographical and biogeographical accuracy in its definitions. “Mesoamerica,” coined for anthropology in the mid-20th century, has both looser and more variable definitions, often unconnected to geology or biogeography. Middle America is thus the appropriate English term for this region in the literature of nonhuman biology. The earliest dates given in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 1989) for use of the Greek “meso-” as a prefix to modify scientific English terms are from 1826 to 1835. These early scientific uses came from anatomy and entomology and included such etymological gems as mesoscutellum and mesorectum. A distribution of the frequency of 129 dated examples of the use of terms modified by “meso-” reveals that the popularity of coining such words peaked between 1875 and 1900 (OED 1989). Before the incorporation of the Greek “meso-” for “middle” became so popular in scientific English, Baird (1864:1) defined Middle America: “As understood in the present work, the term “North America” is intended to cover the region in and north of the valleys of the Rio Grande and Gila, or north of a line drawn from the mouth of the Rio Grande on the Gulf of Mexico, to that of the Yaqui, near Guaymas, on the east side of the Gulf of California, and embraces the peninsulas of Florida and of Lower California and Greenland. Middle America extends from the same line southward to the continental part of South America, including Mexico, Guatemala, San Salvador [= El Salvador], Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, the Isthmus of Panama and of Darien, and the whole of the West Indies, excepting Trinidad and perhaps Tobago.” By the time he terminated his efforts on his Review of American Birds, Baird (1872:iii) had refined this definition: “The southern boundary of the United States, but also including the whole Peninsula of Lower California, is here taken as that of The Condor 113(1):5–6 The Cooper Ornithological Society 2011 COMMENTARY