74 NATURAL SCIENCE. August, 



explain ; there are, no doubt, plenty of convenient answers to incon- 

 venient questions ready filed for despatch in some Circumlocution 

 Office at Washington — at least, we suppose there is such an office 

 there just as there is at Whitehall. The fear and the experience of 

 such delay is undoubtedly the cause of the extensive production in 

 America of those exceedingly irritating pseudo-publications known as 

 "advance sheets," which the authors are accustomed to obtain from 

 the printers by some method that we are unable to expfain, which 

 they distribute to a few favoured friends, and which they rely upon to 

 ensure them the coveted priority. The difficulties in the case are not 

 lessened by the fact that some of these advance sheets are dated, 

 while others are not ; the consequence is that the worker of a sub- 

 sequent generation is constantly puzzled by his dates, and has to 

 waste his time in ransacking second-hand booksellers for these absurd 

 "preliminary notices" and "advance sheets," although the final 

 publications may be standing neatly bound upon his shelves. The 

 distribution of an advance sheet is either publication or it is not : if 

 it is publication, then subsequent publication is nugatory ; if it is not 

 publication, it should not be distributed at all. 



Another disease of which the preliminary notice is a symptom is 

 this perpetual craving after credit. It is very human, very natural, 

 that a man who has done a piece of good work should dislike seeing 

 the praise wrongfully captured by another ; but this, too, is an evil — 

 that people should think so much more of their own self-advancement 

 than of the advancement of science that they should be willing to 

 steal the results of another. Instances of this that have come to our 

 knowledge from America, although we do not mean to say they are 

 confined to that country, force us to believe that there are some people 

 who are men of science first and gentlemen afterwards. It is not 

 likely that either science or their own reputation would be injured if 

 they were to reverse the order ; and as for credit, surely there is not 

 so very much credit, after all, attached to the lucky finder or receiver 

 of some new species. True credit belongs to him who works out its 

 structure and affinities with pain and perseverance. Such work is not 

 of a nature to be either accomplished or published in a hurry, and 

 whether the subject of our investigation be blind batrachians or 

 extinct sea-monsters, it is not likely that we shall jump at correct 

 conclusions before accumulating, sifting, and working out a crowd 

 of details. Here let us, to save any suspicion of personality, quote 

 some remarks made by a reviewer in Nature : — " The tendency at the 

 present among a certain class of small workers to premature publica- 

 tion and to hasty generalisation, leads to most disastrous results in the 

 accumulation of third-rate literature. A single fact, which often turns 

 out to be no fact at all, is hidden in pages of raw and worthless 

 speculation." Does it not sometimes strike these eager scribes that 

 their work would suffer no harm by being brought nearer to maturity ? 

 After all, what they are so anxious to forestall other people with, is 



