686 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Life is expenditure. We must always be paying away. It is sad to behold 

 the conservators — ecstatic hearts— following like eager camp followers in the 

 trail of the whirlwind, collecting and saving the fragments so as to work them up 

 into some pitiful history, poem, biography, monograph, or memorial. 



Why pursue this hopeless task? What is the use in being precious and 

 saving? Nature wastes a thousand seeds, experiments lightly with whole 

 civilisations, and has abandoned a thousand planets that cycle in space forgotten 

 and cold. Both collection and recollection are insufficient. The only perfect 

 preservation is re-creation. Surely our zeal for conservation betokens a miserly, 

 close-fisted nature in us. It cannot be very magnanimous on our part to be so 

 precious since God and Nature are on the side of waste. Let us squander our 

 life and energy in desire, love, experience. And, since so it is to be, let us 

 without vain regrets watch the universe itself be squandered on the passing years, 

 on earthquakes, and on wars. The world is an adventurer, and we try to keep 

 him at home — in a museum. Let us not be niggardly over our planet nor over 

 ourselves. 



Yet it is easy but fatuous to sit at a writing desk and make suggestions for the 

 alteration of human nature. Conservation is as deeply rooted as original sin. 



The Organisation of Scientific Literature (Philip E. B. Jourdain, M.A., 

 Cambridge). 



In this article I shall not be concerned with the important question of the 

 organisation of scientific research in the laboratory or class-room, but with the 

 systematisation of those results of thought and experiment which are published in 

 various scientific books and periodicals. There is not the least doubt but that, 

 as a nation, we need more systematic teaching and more laboratories, but the 

 organisation of scientific literature is, in most cases, a necessary preliminary to 

 the organisation of thought and experiment in mathematics and the natural 

 sciences ; above all, perhaps, in the science of pure mathematics — and we may 

 almost add philosophy, now that it has become scientific — for here we are not 

 wholly dependent even on the laboratory of nature. 



The exigencies of the strenuous present have brought out clearly the utter 

 uselessness of those vague and leisurely generalities which used to be such a 

 common feature of articles on scientific method or its aids, and it is not the pur- 

 pose of this article to deal with vital questions in the way in which they were often 

 dealt with before the war. There was something about those articles that was 

 very like a sermon or those long advertisements of a certain mild and not 

 unpleasant medicine of which we used to see so much. First would come a 

 quotation from the Bible or some poet or classical author about, say, human 

 destiny or Plato and the butterfly ; then would come various dull and estimable 

 platitudes which seemed at first quite off the point of the whole discourse, but 

 they gradually arrived at this point— the price of the remedy, ... or, in the case 

 of the sermon, the collection. 



The basis of my arguments, then, will be formed by a rather narrow domain of 

 scientific literature with which I claim a special acquaintance : mathematical 

 literature. Even during this war, in which Germany is undoubtedly suffering far 

 more than Great Britain, and acutely felt the shortage of compositors in its 

 printing offices long before we did, the work of printing the enormous and almost 

 unique Jahrbuch uber die Fortschritte der Mathematik has gone on slowly but 

 persistently. At the end of 191 6 I received through Switzerland the first part of 



