422 NATURAL SCIENCE. Dec. 1893. 



We learn that Professor Huxley will contribute a final chapter 

 to the " Memoirs of Professor Owen," which are promised early next 

 year. This will be an estimate of Professor Owen's work, and the 

 scientific public will await with considerable interest the words of one 

 so peculiarly and eminently fitted to deal with this important subject. 



Apropos of the article in our last number on Natural Science at 

 the Chicago Exhibition, we may mention that the American Geologist 

 intends to give very full accounts of all the geological exhibits at the 

 Fair. The October number contains a description of the Geological 

 Maps and Models, and also gives a summary of the proceedings at 

 the World's Congress on Geology, which was held in Chicago during 

 the week August 21 to 26. 



It is announced that The Conchologist, a quarterly journal edited 

 and published by Mr. W. E. Collinge, of the Mason College, 

 Birmingham, will be known in future as The Journal of Malacology, the 

 first part of vol. iii. being issued in January, 1894. For the present, it 

 will deal almost exclusively with the slugs, and its aim will be to focus 

 within one journal abstracts of the current literature relating to these 

 molluscs, while affording a means of publication for original work. 



Our reviewer, when he wrote the recent notice of the Zoological 

 Record, must have been gifted with second sight ; at all events, no 

 more apt illustration of his ironical remarks anent the customary 

 mode of reviewing that work could have been afforded than the notice 

 which made its appearance but a day or two later in the columns of 

 a weekly contemporary (Athemdum, November 11). 



The whole notice is literally taken up in calling attention to 

 those misprints and other oversights from which, owing to human 

 frailty and the direct interposition of the printer's devil, a work of 

 this character is never free. The only suggestion offered by this 

 would-be smart critic is to repeat his last year's recommendation that 

 the editor of the Record should procure a blue pencil and use it. 

 Apparently this editorial requisite is equally wanted in other quarters, 

 for we can hardly imagine a critique (?) such as our contemporary 

 has admitted being allowed to appear in any other journal. 



One is tempted to wonder how similar works, did they come up 

 for review, would be handled. What, for instance, would be said 

 about the valuable, and formerly well-edited, Journal of the Royal 

 Microscopical Society ? In the biological record there published we 

 habitually find notices of papers on invertebrate embryology mixed 

 up with those on vertebrate embryology, under the heading " A. — 

 Vertebrata." Misprints, too, are by no means unknown there, and we 

 have met with an instance where two papers on very different 

 subjects, and pages apart, have pohtely exchanged references. 



