1911] Composition of Taxonomic Papers 215 



To be sure, this was an extreme case. Yet that in these 

 "enlightened" days, after years of discussions, protests and 

 recommendations, there should be men who retain the benighted 

 idea that it is preferable to change the paging of reprints from 

 the original — this seems hardly conceivable. Why the change 

 at all? No advantage is gained thereby. On the contrary, 

 it is a disadvantage for workers who are not constantly in touch 

 with all the leading centers of scientific work and who have no 

 large scientific library at their elbows. For these it results in 

 tedious correspondence, and this most often when there is 

 little time to be spared for these irksome labors. 



One lucid individual went to another extreme. The travels 

 of a certain explorer, together with the scientific results of his 

 collections, as monographed by various specialists, were pub- 

 lished in a large scientific journal. As all of these contributions 

 were finally to be collected in a separate volume, and as the 

 paging of this volume would be just as important for reference 

 as that of the journal, the editor thought of a "happy" solu- 

 tion of all difficulties. Namely, the original paging of the con- 

 tribution as it appeared in the journal was retained for the 

 reprint ; the future paging of the volume was also put in ; and 

 to meet all contingencies the reprint was given a special paging 

 of 1 — 50 or other. Unfortunately, this genius forgot to note 

 which was which, so that, as the printer's folio number and the 

 publisher's file number are at the bottom of each page besides 

 the three numbers above, I now have my choice between five 

 numbers for page reference. 



As a rule reprints do not suffer from surplus information 

 as in the preceding case ; they usually lack part of the necessary 

 information. This lack in most cases is the absence of the vol- 

 ume number (or the year of the volume) from the reprint, or 

 the year of publication, or both. Sometimes the two are given, 

 but the name of the publication is nowhere indicated. The 

 benign opinion that every scientific worker is familiar with the 

 size of the volumes, the style of composition and the issues of 

 "the four-hundred" leading scientific publications, — this opin- 

 ion is, of course, founded on long experience and hence must be 

 considered sound. If I receive a reprint that contains the 

 year and number of the volume, but not the title of the publica- 

 tion itself, it is, therefore, a simple proposition to locate the 

 correct journal from the size of the page and the style of com- 



