ig85 . NOTES AND COMMENTS. 295 



his results have been proclaimed to contemporary, perhaps to 

 competing, workers ; after a lapse of time, which in the case of some 

 work may be fatal to the author's claim of priority : it may be that, 

 after all this, his paper is refused ultimate publication. The refusal 

 to publish may be based on valid grounds ; we have sufficient 

 confidence in the common sense and in the integrity of scientific men 

 to suppose that such is usually the case. But there are cases 

 notorious in the history of science, and there are cases that one hears 

 of every year, if not every day, in which a paper is rejected by a 

 society, either because its views do not jump with the personal views 

 of the referee, because the author is not altogether a persona grata, or 

 because some merely technical condition has not been observed. Mr. 

 Cockerell's case is none of these : the paper appears to have been 

 declined simply because the Zoological Society did not think it its 

 business to descend to the publication of the description of so insig- 

 nificant a creature as a new Coccid ; and the Society has a perfect 

 right to limit its own sphere of action. But in this case, as in all the 

 others, the delay and the semi-publication are a hardship, though not 

 necessarily an injustice to the author. 



It may be replied to this complaint that an author sends his 

 paper to a society, just as he sends it to the editor of a magazine, 

 under certain conditions that are (or that ought to be) well known 

 and clearly defined. Some societies very properly send a notice to 

 every author, immediately on receipt of his paper, acquainting him 

 with those conditions, and the author can then withdraw his paper 

 if he choose. All this is very true, but the case is not thereby 

 improved. There is a very considerable difference between the 

 action of one of these learned societies and that of a competent 

 magazine-editor. A society, we are told, keeps a paper more than 

 two-and-a-half months ; an editor, if he is going to decline an article, 

 usually does so within as many weeks : some editors have been 

 known to return articles within as many hours. Would it not, then, 

 be possible for the procedure of societies to be approximated to 

 editorial methods ? These lengthy delays have a quaint, old-world, 

 respectability about them, but they are scarcely suited to modern 

 needs. Even the society must be a loser sometimes, quite as much 

 as the author, especially when, as we know very well to be no rare 

 occurrence, an author's paper gets into type before it is rejected. 

 Might not a committee consider papers before they are read in public 

 instead of after ? It is no hard matter to decide whether a paper is 

 or is not simple rubbish, or whether it comes or does not come 

 within the scope of any particular society. As for any fear of 

 unwarranted boycotting, or of illegitimate suppression, or of stealing 

 an author's results, we know, to speak quite candidly, that these things 

 have occurred quite often enough under the present system ; and even if 

 there were any greater temptations under the proposed alternative, 

 at all events the author would no longer be handicapped by a two or 



