1894. NOTES AND COMMENTS. ^og 



■ These cards are samples of what is intended eventually to be a 

 complete card-catalogue of zoological literature arranged under 

 authors' names. The beginnings of the undertaking are, however, 

 small. It is proposed to begin the catalogue with the current 

 volumes of the periodicals now available at the University of 

 Minnesota, which only number forty-two, whereas the actual number 

 of periodicals containing zoological papers is not less than a 

 thousand. But arrangements will soon be made to get the titles of 

 all other important zoological writings, so that the catalogue will be 

 complete for all zoological literature not recorded in Cams and 

 Engelmann's Bibliotheca Zoologica up to the end of 1861. 



The great feature of the proposal, however, is not the complete- 

 ness of the catalogue, but the fact that these cards will be issued to 

 all who choose to subscribe for them, at a rate not exceeding a penny 

 a slip, thus furnishing them with a continuous and up-to-date reference 

 to all zoological literature. The advantage of this plan over all other 

 systems is that the list is always kept in alphabetical order ; or slips 

 can be selected and arranged in any other order that the purchaser 

 desires. Let us make for a moment the very desirable supposi- 

 tion that the promoters of the Zoological Record will subscribe for a 

 set of slips. Then the editor could at once roughly sort out the large 

 majority of these slips and hand them over to the recorders of the 

 different groups. The remaining doubtful slips could be gone through 

 by the editor or any competent zoologist with the aid of the original 

 publications, and could thus be sorted according to the group or groups 

 with which they dealt ; duplicates could of course be purchased when 

 required. By this simple means each recorder would be furnished at 

 the start with his Hst of titles, and whether the list were complete or 

 not it would at all events be known that it was complete for certain 

 periodicals. Each recorder would thus have to refer only to the 

 papers in his list, and would be spared the drudgery of wading through 

 piles of profitless publications. Librarians also will be glad to be 

 spared the trouble that authors' copies are continually giving them, 

 since their subscription will get for them not merely the reference, 

 but a slip all ready to insert in their card-catalogue. In short, this 

 enterprise may do much to remedy the sad state of things described 

 in the vigorous article by Mr. Stebbing contributed to our last 

 number ; and we venture to think it superior to the proposals that 

 Mr. Stebbing has put forward there. 



There is nothing very new in this plan. Similar suggestions 

 were made in the correspondence columns of Natiivc during August 

 and September, 1892, while on the continent Dr. H. H. Field seems 

 to spend most of his time in advocating the establishment of a 

 central zoological bureau to perform this very work.^ The only 

 thing that is nev/, and that is really astonishing, is that someone has 

 at last made a beginning. We may for various reasons regret that 

 1 See Mem. Soc. Zool. France, vii., p. 259; 1894. 



