200 ECOLOGY AND LIFE HISTORY OF THE COMMON FROG 



Papers still appear in which the author has apparently not bothered 

 to look at anything but the most recent hterature of his own country. 

 They can often be detected by the range of dates in the bibhography 

 and by the national bias in the choice of journals, but this may not 

 always be quite fair. An author may be discussing a very hmited topic, 

 in which the only important information is what he has just discovered, 

 or he may be taking it for granted that the previous work will be 

 perfectly well known to his readers, but, on the whole, a one-country, 

 one-decade bibhography is not a sign of good quahty. Zoology was 

 well estabhshed in the eighteenth century, and, in fact, in hfe history 

 studies this hterature may be more important than that of the nine- 

 teenth, when biologists worked mainly on dead animals in laboratories. 

 It is not an accident that of the three observations on spawning given 

 in Chapter 9, none was in the nineteenth century for in this as in many 

 other matters, the eighteenth and twentieth centuries have much in 

 common, and are both unlike the nineteenth. 



Publishing Observations 



A person who has made observations that are original has a duty to 

 pubhsh them. Books and a few scientific journals are pubhshed as 

 commercial enterprises, but most original scientific work is pubhshed 

 as papers in journals at the expense of a society which derives its income 

 from the subscriptions of its members, often the same persons who 

 contribute the papers. In a roundabout way, therefore, scientists pay 

 for the pubhcation of their own work. The quantity of scientific 

 work now coming forward and the shortage of funds for publication 

 has, in my heterodox opinion, given so much power into the hands of 

 referees, editors and pubhcation committees that there is a danger that 

 the reciprocal duty — to facihtate pubhcation — is not always per- 

 formed. An author, however junior, is someone who has found 

 something. He may not have done the work very well, and his paper 

 may need alteration to make it presentable, but the order of scientific 

 importance is: (i) Author, (2) Reader, (3) Editor and Referee, the 

 servants of the others. It is as difficult to judge the importance of a 

 scientific paper when first pubhshed as it is to judge a new work of 

 art, and it is a presumption for anyone to stand in the way of a scientific 

 author and his readers. This difficulty is not new. For example, there 

 were three simultaneous discoveries of the Periodic Law, in which it 

 was shown that the properties of the elements varied regularly with 



