The Latin Name For Hummingbirds

Something I read that led me to look up the Latin name for hummingbirds, I found the following interesting thread.

The Latin name for the hummingbird family is Trochilidae, and it originates from the Greek word _trochilos_, meaning a small bird.  It's highly unlikely if no impossible that the Ancient Greeks used the word specifically for hummingbirds, since hummingbirds are native only to the Americas and wouldn't have been known to the Greeks.

But sunbirds in the Old World resemble hummingbirds. Sunbirds are tiny, nectar-feeding, brightly coloured birds and they are found across Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. Their resemblance to hummingbirds is said to be an example of convergent evolution, where different lineages make similar adaptations, like the hovering flight and appetite for nectar that is shared by sunbirds and hummingbirds. So it's possible the Greeks used trochilos for birds like sunbirds, or maybe even for wrens or other tiny birds.

And then again, maybe they didn't care too much for fine distinctions. Perhaps any small, darting bird was just "a small bird."

But back to the name Trochilidae. Hummingbirds belong to the order Apodiformes, which means "footless"  from the Greek  a -_ (without) and pous - (foot).

There are three families in this order: hummingbirds, tree swifts, and swifts.

Of course, these birds do have feet. It's just that they're just not used for walking. Hummingbirds have four toes: three facing forward and one back. Their feet are tiny (no surprise there) and structured in such a way that they can perch but can't walk or hop. That's why you won't see a hummingbird on the ground.

Tree swifts and swifts differ in their toe arrangements. Tree swifts, like hummingbirds, have one backward-facing toe, allowing them to perch. Swifts, on the other hand, have all four toes facing forward, which suits their near-permanent life in the air.

So who decided that Trochilidae was to be the name for hummingbirds?

Nicholas Aylward Vigors coined the name in 1825. Vigors was a prominent figure in early zoology. He co-founded the Zoological Society of London in 1826, and in 1833 he established the organisation that would become the Royal Entomological Society.

Vigors was also a proponent of the Quinarian system. It was a 19th-century classification approach that grouped all life into fives - five species per genus, five genera per family, and so on in the belief that nature followed a symmetry. As evolutionary biology took hold in the mid-1800s, the Quinarian system was replaced by an evidence-based approach grounded in shared ancestry.

How many early scientists have tried to force species or observations of any kind into boxes because the thought that preceded the observation demanded it?