370 NATURAL SCIENCE. December. 



thoroughly worked out by someone else. The information is usually 

 given in a tone that leaves the impression on the student's mind that 

 the anatomy of the animal in question is the private property of the 

 first describer, and that to publish the same thing again would be a 

 sort of infringement on his rights. From our present point of view, 

 however, the record of every dissection that has been made would be 

 most valuable, and there can be little doubt that an immense amount 

 of valuable time and work has been lost to us through the worker's 

 mistaken impression that, because it had all been done before, he was 

 not justified in burdening literature with a repetition. It may be con- 

 tended that, if every worker recorded all his observations, the world 

 itself would not contain the books which would be made, and that a 

 huge mass of useless lumber would more than counterbalance the 

 value of a few useful facts. This I do not think would be the case ; 

 there are a great number of scientific periodicals, journals, and pro- 

 ceedings which could easily afford to enlarge their space if more 

 material were forthcoming. Moreover, it is so easy nowadays to hear 

 of and refer to the work of others, that less and less space will in 

 future be needed for statements of work done. For instance, suppose 

 an anatomist wishes, for his own instruction, to work through the 

 anatomy of the cat, he would be more than justified in sending, on the 

 completion of his investigation, a note to any zoological publication 

 saying what he had done, what he had looked for, and that in every 

 particular, if it so happened, his own observations tallied with those 

 of Mivart in his classical work on the cat. If this were done we 

 should soon have a valuable set of statistics, and should begin to 

 appreciate which parts of the cat's body were most stable and which 

 most variable ; and it would be possible to contrast these parts with 

 those of man, and eventually of other mammals. 



In referring to the descriptions of work done by many observers, 

 one is often led to regret that they have evidently compressed it into 

 the smallest limits, and have left out all mention of points which to 

 them appeared trivial, forgetting that some of these apparently trivial 

 points might turn out to be important characters of an order or family, 

 and that, by neglecting to record them, they might possibly be leaving 

 out the most important point in the whole observation. How often 

 one finds, in referring to papers on myology, two or three important 

 muscles left out, presumably because, as they were quite normal, the 

 recorder did not think it needful to encumber his communication with 

 facts which were the same as those mentioned by others before. 

 These omissions are often very serious to the worker studying the 

 myology of a group : he cannot take it for granted that because the 

 muscles in question are not mentioned they are therefore the same as 

 those recorded by others ; he cannot even feel sure that they have 

 been looked for. Thus good work is irretrievably lost. I feel 

 convinced that the saying " if a thing is worth doing at all it is worth 

 doing well " applies to the work of recounting scientific observations 



