NATURAL SCIENCE: 



A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress. 



No. 23. Vol. IY. JANUARY. 1894. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS. 



Progress. 



WITH this Number, Natural Science enters on its fourth volume. 

 Two years of experiment, and of those difficulties incidental to 

 all new publications, are now happily ended. Without deviating 

 from the path originally marked out for it, this venture has secured 

 for itself a basis of which the firmness may be measured by its wide 

 extension. For this result, far more fortunate than they anticipated, 

 the promoters are indebted less to their own labours than to the 

 kindly aid so constantly offered them by an ever-swelling stream of 

 contributors, and to the warm welcome extended by an ever-widening 

 circle of readers. To all of these, whether at home in England or far 

 off in her scattered colonies, whether fellow-workers of our own race 

 in America or workers joined with us in the pursuit of a common aim 

 in all foreign lands from Germany to Japan — to one and all this 

 Number will bear our cordial thanks for the past, and will express 

 that gratitude which is a lively sense of favours to come. 



To those of our readers and helpers who have not been with us 

 from the beginning, and who have found difficulty in obtaining our 

 earlier numbers, we should like to take this opportunity of restating 

 our aims. We have been from the beginning, and we still hope to be, 

 as our sub-title indicates, a review of Scientific Progress. Month by 

 month we bring to the specialist a critical account of what is being 

 done in other lines than his own ; while, for the general reader, the 

 specialist himself is constantly invited to render more accessible his 

 stores of knowledge. As examples of such work, we may refer to the 

 articles in this number on Cell-Division and on the Fucaceae. We 

 endeavour also to search out items of interest that are hidden away 

 in unhkely volumes or in publications not easily obtained. Chiefly, 

 in this respect, do we attempt to give the news of our own local 

 scientific societies and of similar bodies scattered throughout the 

 British Dominions. And here it is that we need most of that friendly 



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