AUG 12 1896 



73 



NATURAL SCIENCE: 



A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress. 



No. 54. Vol. IX. AUGUST. 1896. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS. 



The Excusers of the Preliminary Notice. 



WE have at last found a defender for the preliminary notice, and it 

 gives us great pleasure to publish in our correspondence pages 

 the letter sent us by Mr. F. A. Lucas, of the National Museum, 

 Washington. We derive still greater pleasure from the circumstance 

 that this letter gives us the opportunity of exposing the underlying 

 grounds of our objection. We do not wish to deny that under certain 

 conditions, such, for instance, as those to which Mr. Lucas alludes, 

 the publication of a preliminary notice may fairly be called a necessity, 

 but this does not make such publication any the less an evil. In such 

 cases it is the conditions themselves that are in fault, and the pre- 

 liminary notice is merely, as it were, an attempt of the body to fight 

 against more deep-seated disease. 



In the case of our American friends, the disease appears to be of 

 the following nature : we in England, happily removed from the 

 intrigues of politico-scientific placemen, are accustomed, on receipt of 

 the beautiful volumes which come to us from the United States, to 

 fall into a rapture of admiration without always considering how long 

 a time has elapsed between the sending in of the manuscript by an 

 author and the issue of the work by the Government. Those who 

 wish to know the difficulties that are placed in the way of sincere and 

 hard-working investigators may turn to a prefatory note attached by 

 Professor Hall to his handbook of the Brachiopoda in the nth Annual 

 Report of the State Geologist of New York, as well as to a similar preface 

 on p. 6o2 of the 13th Annual Report. It is, we have heard, often the 

 case that, when the proof has been read and the plates printed, 

 important publications are still kept waiting for a year or more, 

 although the additional expense of printing off and binding would be 

 trivial in comparison with that already incurred. We are still waiting 

 for Dr. Brown Goode's paper on deep-sea fishes, and the second 

 volume of Major Bendire's "Life-histories of North American Birds," 

 . which we understand were ready for publication a year ago. What 

 the reasons for this and similar delays may be, it would be difficult to 



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