[Taxacom] source of quote about keys

[Neal Evenhuis]

At 8:07 AM -0400 8/31/09, Steve Marshall wrote:
>Dear Taxacomers,
>
>I'm looking for the original source of a choice quote describing 
>keys as "written by those who don't need them for those who can't 
>use them". I've used this line in my lectures since the early 1980s, 
>and when I used it in a talk at the 2002 International Congress of 
>Dipterology I attributed to "my old professor" (a nice way of saying 
>I had no idea where I had first heard it). Walter and Winterton, in 
>their excellent 2007 review of keys and the crisis in taxonomy, 
>preface their introduction with the same quote and attribute it to 
>Lobanov, 2003. Packer et al 2009 also preface their 
>in-praise-of-barcoding paper in exactly the same way with exactly 
>the same quote, but credit Packer (2008) for the origin of the 
>quote. I'm not aware of any other usage of the line in print, nor am 
>I aware of where it originated. It is possible that Lobanov, Packer, 
>and I all came up with the line independently, but it seems more 
>probable that it has been circulating for decades. Can anybody help 
>pinpoint the original source?

Hi Steve,

Dunno if this is the original source, but a search through Google 
books came up with one in George Edmund's 1976 Mayflies of North 
America:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ykkjKuPbE5AC&pg=PA35&dq=keys+are+written+by+biologists+who+don't+need+them+for+those+who+can't+use+them#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Its origin probably predates that too and may use other words so 
searching through Google books or the web may necessitate trying 
different permutations to get the oldest quote.

Have fun,

Neal