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A Proposed Botanical Abstracts Journal—What is probably 
the most important movement ever inaugurated by American 
botany is the plan, launched at the Pittsburgh meeting of the 
Botanical Society of America, December 28, 1917—January 2, 
1918, for the establishment of a journal of botanical abstracts. 
Over a quarter of a million pages of botanical periodical litera- 
ture are published annually, and it has become quite impossible 
for investigators and teachers to keep abreast of this literature, 
even in restricted departments of the science. As a result of the 
war the international abstract journal, Botanisches Centralblatt, 
published for a number of years past in Germany, has ceased to 
appear, at least in the countries of the Allies. Plans now ma- 
turing for the new journal aim to make it international in scope, 
and to cover the entire field of botany in the widest sense of the 
term, including both pure and applied science, and embracing 
bacteriology, forestry, pharmacognosy, plant raw products, foods 
and fibres, horticulture, agriculture, agronomy and botanical edu- 
cation, as well as the commonly recognized subdivisions of 
botanical science—pathology, morphology, physiology, cytology, 
systematic botany, paleobotany, ecology and plant geography, 
and genetics. An editorial board is being organized, and plans 
are under discussion for securing the financial support that will 
be necessary until the journal shall become self-supporting. A 
governing committee on the new journal was elected as follows: 
J. H. Barnhart, New York Botanical Garden; H. C. Cowles, 
University of Chicago; B. M. Duggar, Missouri Botanical 
Garden; C. S. Gager, Brooklyn Botanic Garden; R. A. Harper, 
Columbia University (Chairman); B. FE. Livingston, Johns 
Hopkins University (Editor-in-Chief) ; FF. C. Newcombe, Uni- 
versity of Michigan; Donald Reddick, Cornell University; C. 5. 
Shear, Bureau of Plant Industry, Washington, D. C.; and Forrest 
Shreve, Carnegie Institution (Desert Laboratory), ‘Tucson, 
Arizona. 
The opportunity for the launching of this journal is now at 
hand; it may not recur, and no more important nor more urgently 
needed service could now be rendered to botanical science than to 
make possible the early realization of the plans now maturing. 

