590 Journal of Applied Microscopy. 



For the first year, however, such action would have been impossible even 

 under the most favorable circumstances, for the first requisite was to gather the 

 information. Therefore, at the start, certain general groups were established 

 for subscription, but it can hardly be said that individual questions were 

 offered. 



This first year proved, in reality, however, quite disastrous. The director 

 of the Concilium was taken seriously ill at the beginning, and was for a long 

 time unable to take any active part in the work. Furthermore, grave technical 

 difficulties had arisen, which made it necessary to suspend publication and 

 modify the plans in accordance with the experience that had been acquired. 

 These difficulties were inherent in the card system, which had never before been 

 put into use upon such a scale. Not being able to expect of our subscribers that 

 such an enormous bulk of cards would be kept in order by a trained scientist, it 

 was necessary to print symbols on the cards showing the order in which they 

 were to be placed in the catalogue. For this purpose the Dewey decimal system 

 seemed to us, on the whole, the simplest and most efficacious means; we have 

 never regretted our decision in this regard. We found, however, that the appli- 

 cation of the system to cards involved special difficulties which we had not 

 foreseen. For an ordinary bibliography in pamphlet form, appearing at frequefit 

 intervals, a simple division into general chapters is quite sufficient. Not so with 

 the cards ; a division which in an ordinary monthly issue would only contain ten 

 titles, would yield 120 cards by the end of the year, and in a few years would be 

 quite unwieldy. In view of this cumulative character of the cards, the system must 

 be very detailed. Moreover, while a book-bibliography publishes the titles in a 

 given order adapted to the most general needs, the card system should strive to 

 meet varied individual wants. 



In no group of sciences are these individual needs so diversified as in 

 Biology. One investigator wishes to know what has been published in regard 

 to a given species, another wishes to follow a certain phenomenon through the 

 entire animal kingdom and has little concern about the particular species that 

 has served as material for study, yet another wishes to work up the fauna of a 

 given district and requires a geographical arrangement, another cares less about the 

 results than about the technical methods that have been used in the investigation. 

 Hitherto, the zoological bibliographies have chosen one of these aspects alone ; 

 this is also the course that the Concilium had thus far followed. It was evident 

 that if some means could be devised for permitting great freedom of arrange- 

 ment without sacrificing the principle that the arrangement of the cards was to 

 be purely mechanical, the new publication would take at once the highest rank. 

 The difficulties, however, long seemed almost insurmountable. 



In the spring of 1897, the problem had been practically solved, and pub- 

 lication was resumed. The results were not, however, fully satisfactory. The 

 great fault lay in the fact that the same cards were to be used by subscribers in 

 very different ways according as they wished to emphasize the systematic, the 

 topical, or the faunistic aspect. This difficulty was very fundamental, since no 

 printing office, save one especially equipped for the work, could well undertake 

 the complicated operation of changing the symbols during the printing, so as to 



