INSTRUMENTS AND METHODS OF RESEARCH 197 



tools close by and within ready reach. He cannot afford to go to a 

 distant library and then possibly find the book out. Private possession 

 permits him, furthermore, to make marginal notes and references to 

 enable him quickly to put his finger on the very thing needed. 



Owing to these well-organized needs, there has grown up a cour- 

 teous and friendly interchange of publications among coworkers and 

 sympathizers in the same field that to my mind deserves the highest 

 encouragement. The time has unfortunately gone when scientific in- 

 vestigators can write such delightful and voluminous letters as passed 

 between the research workers of half a century and more ago. The 

 present system of interchange of publications has necessarily taken 

 the place, to a very large extent, of the early letter-writing. It is a 

 system of gradual develoj)ment along the lines of least resistance that 

 it would be disadvantageous to contend against until some more ef- 

 fective means of intercommunication among scientific men has been 

 devised. 



But such free interchange of research publications can only be 

 conducted to a limited extent and can embrace only certain kinds 

 of publications, viz., generally reprints or those of which the original 

 cost for publication has already been borne in some manner, be it by 

 a journal or by some research foundation. Larger publications, how- 

 ever, because of their expensiveness, must generally be restricted, for 

 one reason or another, in their general circulation, with the inevitable 

 result that the persons directly reached may be entirely out of pro- 

 portion to the importance of tlie work undertaken. 



Scientific men and scientific bodies could well afford to pause and 

 consider the tremendous cost of publication and the rather frequent 

 waste of money incurred. Why is it, for example, that when an ex- 

 plorer gives an account of his travels in an unexplored region for the 

 commercial press he finds it possible to say what he wishes in an at- 

 tractive and handy octavo form, but when he is working for an en- 

 dowed institution he feels compelled to present his matter in an ex- 

 pensive, ponderous, quarto form, inconvenient to handle? 



It should he noted that it is as important to make research work 

 known as to do it. To get our friends to read the contributions we 

 may make to science requires nowadays no little skill and diplomacy 

 and an attractiveness of literary style on the part of the author not so 

 essential in the days of less frequent printed works. The original 

 purposes of important and costly expeditions are sometimes well nigh 

 defeated or superseded, because of the delay in publication, ensuing 

 from the elaborateness of the plan adopted for the reduction of the 

 field results and the form of publication decided upon. 



Reduction in the pretentiousness, size and cost of scientific publi- 

 cations appears to me to he one of the greatest needs of research 

 to-day. 



