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NATURAL SCIENCE [December 
A New ScIENTIFIC SERIAL FROM JAMAICA 
As we briefly announced last month (p. 351), Jamaica furnishes us 
with one more promising infant in an over-populated world of 
scientific literature! To such a new-born child it can scarcely be 
said, “ weeping thou sat’st while all around thee smiled,” for, while 
the infant chuckles, distracted naturalists shed inky tears. It 
might sound rude to say that all such babes must come to the 
workhouse. To the house in which the specialist works sooner or 
later they have to come. If every name in the atlas of the world 
insists upon having its own separate representative in serial scientific 
literature, the wasteful dissipation of energy will increase in a 
lamentable degree. The diligence of the student will be more and 
more exhausted in a vain attempt to garner all the scattered 
fragments of information, which may or may not be of value, 
concerning each strictly limited branch of enquiry. It is, therefore, 
only with a moderate rapture of welcome that we can greet this 
first number of the Annals of the Institute of Jamaica, 
The opening number is entirely devoted to a list of crustaceans. 
Faunistic catalogues are not unfrequently a weary waste of mis- 
applied industry. They often contain no guarantee whatever that 
the author knows what he is writing about. When the identifica- 
tions are original, they are as likely as not to be wrong; when they 
are borrowed, they are not.very unlikely to be the endorsement of 
some ancient error. Miss Rathbun’s “List of the Decapod Crustacea 
of Jamaica” stands on a different footing, because she happens to 
combine with a very exact knowledge of the objects catalogued a 
full and accurate ‘acquaintance with the literature of the subject. 
The list, therefore, is a critical list, and great confidence may be 
placed in the names and synonyms and geographical distribution of 
species which it records. But it also contains notes and descriptions 
of independent importance. Some of these are quoted at full length, 
though without marks of quotation, from earlier papers, while others 
contain corrections of previously published opinions. Surely in the 
interests of science the repetitions would have been better omitted, 
and still more surely in the interests of science the corrections 
would have better appeared in the Proceedings which published the 
original statements. 
While placing the highest value on Miss Rathbun’s knowledge 
and acumen, we cannot always accept her decisions on points of 
nomenclature. The name Stenorynchus seticornis (Herbst) should 
stand, whether Slabber were right or wrong in stating that his 
specimen came from the East Indies. He appears to have kept his 
Kast and West Indian crabs together, and may have made some 
confusion, and if not, as the present list shows, the same species of 
