IS92. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS. 243 



they are the outcome of a century of progress they cannot be obviated 

 in a day. The essayist's plan of one Science one Journal would also 

 mean one Science one Editor, and the reign of a powerful but small 

 centralised bureaucracy. The system of having papers examined 

 by specialists before publication seems to be essential and to work 

 well upon the whole, so long as there are several competing journals ; 

 but if there were only one, there might simply be a monopoly of 

 publication in the hands of a small clique. No doubt the occasional 

 publication of a biological memoir in the Philosophical Transactions is 

 inconvenient to one who only takes in the jfournal of the Linnean Society ; 

 but then so is the publication of a long telegram in the Times to one who 

 trusts to a brief summary in the Star. That, however, is not so much 

 an argument for the fusion of all the daily papers, as for improving 

 our system of indexing periodical literature. If the Royal Society 

 would do more of this in the future than it has done in the past, it 

 would no doubt be well ; but it seems to us it would be a misfortune 

 to remove the stimulus of the issue of a journal in which, like the 

 Belgian Memoires Couronnes, a' Naturalist may hope to publish his 

 finest piece of work. In other departments there seems to be a 

 tendency towards a better distribution of papers ; palaeontological 

 papers that bear simply on systematic Zoology as apart from the 

 problems of Geology are being contributed more to the Zoological, 

 than to the Geological Society ; while as the same society is receiving 

 more of the Zoological work, the Linnean Society will in time 

 probably find its true place as the Botanical Society of London, 



By slow changes such as these more good is likely to be wrought 

 than by any of the revolutionary methods advocated by our essayist. 

 His proposal to abolish competition would retard progress and 

 endanger liberty, and, like the late Archbishop McGee, we would 

 rather have British science unorganised and free than economical 

 and enslaved. The author, however, does not seem to regard his own 

 proposals as likely to be accepted, and he might well have adopted 

 as his motto Carlyle's lament that " Labour will vainly need to be 

 somewhat ' organised ' as they say — God knows with what difficulty." 



The Life-History of the Lobsters. 



During the past few weeks an unusual number of important 

 contributions have been made to the discussion of some of the most 

 fundamental problems of modern Biology. Fanciful speculations 

 and "genealogical trees," of course, flourish as ever ; but there is an 

 obvious tendency in nearly all directions towards a more minute and 

 laborious study of the facts and phenomena in which the processes 

 •of life must be ultimately revealed. Investigations like those of 

 Brooks and Herrick on the life-history of the Macrurous Crustacea, 

 of Jousseaume on the distribution of the varieties of MoUusca in the 

 Red Sea, and of Kiikenthal on the development of the mammalian 



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