EDITORIAL 



A movement has been started by a number of botanists 

 for the establishment of a journal of botanical abstracts, upon 

 the theory that the flood of botanical literature is now so 

 great that no single person can hope to see everything in his 

 line that is published if he depends upon looking through all the 

 publications to find it. It is estimated that more than :>00,000 

 pages of such matter appear annually. In addition to this, 

 most of the regular publications are reported to have on hand 

 more matter than they can publish in a year. To remedy this 

 latter condition, additional journals are suggested, but the 

 critical observer is inclined to suggest that each of the publi- 

 cations now in existence get an editor who can really edit and 

 trim up a lot of those long-winded articles into sizes propor- 

 tional to their values. Possibly half of those 300,000 pages 

 are wasted in proving facts that everybody is willing to grant 

 without argument, in describing minutely methods that may 

 be assumed were adopted, and in publishing tables and dia- 

 grams of no special significance. Think what a desert Dar- 

 win's "Origin of Species" would have been had he thought it 

 necessary to give all the statistics and describe minutely all 

 the experiments upon which that famous book is based. We 

 do not mean to belittle exact and careful scientific work, or 

 to object to detailed descriptions of important and little known 

 processes, but we do mean t<> imply that too many reports of 

 research in botanical fields are padded with matter of no con- 

 sequence which might well be eliminated. 



