;24 



NATURE 



[June 27, 1918 



l.<.t\veen English and German, a proportion always 

 greater from year to year chose the latter. Our future 

 technical and scientific men thus completed their in- 

 struction with German books and periodicals ; and 

 when their studies were finished, and they entered the 

 great arena of industrial and scientific life, the influence 

 of this intellectual training, to a great extent of the 

 German stamp, had its after-effects on all the scientific, 

 technical, and economic relations of our country with 

 Germany. 



It is, therefore, necessary that Britain, throwing aside 

 not only in politics, but also in all the varied forrns 

 of international relations, its proud device of " splendid 

 isolation," should understand the full necessity of this 

 reciprocal moral and intellectual penetration of our 

 two countries, and convince herself that no efforts to 

 produce and intensify it can ever l^e great enough. 



I should be glad, for example, to see that in the 

 British commercial schools Italian commercial corre- 

 spondence should be taught; that the principal indus- 

 trial and commercial firms in Britain should mean- 

 while, as soon as the war is over, call for Italian 

 voung men to conduct their correspondence \yith Italy 

 "in Italian; and that an ever-increasing number of 

 British young men should be sent every year to Italy 

 —whether to our commercial schools and commercial 

 xmiversities or to our largest industrial, commercial, 

 and banking houses — to exercise themselves in Italian 

 and to know better the economic life of our country. 

 Both in Britain and in Italy special sections of the 

 respective commercial schools and commercial uni- 

 versities should be devoted to the preparation of com- 

 mercial travellers and agents, perhaps also commercial 

 consular officials, through the careful study of the 

 commercial and industrial needs of each country. 

 ■ Then it would be of fundamental importance, as 

 we have just now said, to see to the reciprocal penetra- 

 tion of a technical and intellectual sort. The exchange 

 of teachers and students in the universities and other 

 superior schools, which will no doubt have been already 

 thought of, will aid this not a little. Very useful also 

 in this regard will be the establishment, not ortly in 

 Milan and London, but in all the principal cities of 

 Britain and Italy, of Italo-British institutes. And no 

 less is it to be recommended that British books should 

 be more largely bought by the public Italian libraries, 

 and Italian books by British libraries; and that in 

 every important city in- Britain and Italy should be 

 formed associations of the studious, the technical men, 

 the manufacturers, for the purpose of founding 

 reading-rooms, in which would be found all the im- 

 portant foreign reviews — scientific, technical, economic, 

 legal, political, historical, literary, artistic, and so on. 



But all this would certainly be not yet sufficient. 

 If Britain wishes to regain in other countries for its 

 book production, both technical and scientific, the place 

 from which Germany was gradually ousting her, her 

 authors must no longer assume a point of view too 

 strictly or exclusively British, but must "inter- 

 nationalise" themselves mo.e, as precisely the 

 Germans did. It is necessary, in other words, that 

 the British books and periodicals, both technical and 

 scientific, should look more frequently than they do 

 now to see what is being done and thought ' out- 

 side their own country; that due account should be 

 taken of this in order to get out of that isolation from 

 the rest of the world which is such a hindrance to 

 their diffusion in the countries that are not Anglo- 

 Saxon ; that they should talce 'more care to divest 

 themselves of their exotic appearance, which to us 

 Latins is more marked in them than in the book pro- 

 duction of any other country, derived from archaic 

 systems and methods, such as their systems of jneasuro 

 and the like, which have hitherto disdained to give 



NO. 2539, VOL. lOl] . 



place to systems and methods now become inter- 

 national. 



At the same time, British publishers might be asked 

 to give more attention, and on broader lines, to adver- 

 tising their books in the countries rot Anglo-Saxon. 

 Let me be allowed to quote in this connection a typical 

 fact, drawn from my personal experience. In the first 

 years of existence of the international review Scientia, 

 of which I have the honour to be editor, no one would 

 l>elieve the difficulties we met in obtaining gratis from 

 British publishers their books for which we asked in 

 order to review them ; while the German publishers 

 hastened to send us works costing as much as forty, 

 sixty, or more marks, and after our first request con- 

 tinued sending books of their own accord, many British 

 publishers answered us, even with regard to works 

 costing only 5s. or los., that the greatest concession 

 they could make us was to let us have them at half- 

 price. The result was, of course, that in the early 

 days of Scientia the German works reviewed in it were 

 three or four times as many as the British, and cer- 

 tainly through no fault of ours. 



Then courageous publishers, or publishing trusts 

 formed for the purpose, ought to put out in "Britain 

 English translations of Italian technical and scientific 

 works, and in Italy Italian translations of works in 

 English. The British public must, in fact, cease to ap- 

 preciate only what is Biitish,and become convinced that 

 in other countries there may be something good which 

 deserves to. be known. In this connection the fact is 

 significant that before the war our review above-named 

 had in Germany a circulation four or five times larger 

 than it had in Britain. It was a sign that the German 

 public recognised more than the British public the 

 utility and interest there was in following attentively 

 the intern-ational movement of ideas, and appreciated 

 more the scientific production of other countries. 



But a measure which we consider would be of more 

 avail than any other to effectuate this closer moral 

 and intellectual union between Britain and Italy, and 

 in general between all the peoples of the Entente, is 

 that already advocated by the writer in Italian, French, 

 and British periodicals, and taken into most favour- 

 able consideration by all the scientific and political 

 Press of the Allied countries : the establishment, for 

 each of the principal branches of science, of periodicals, 

 international as regard collaboration, but " Ententist " 

 as to editing and publishing— that is to say, scientific 

 periodicals which might fulfil for each branch of science 

 that function which Scientia exercises for scientific 

 synthesis in general, embracing, as it does, all the 

 sciences. Here 1 add that the same thing could and 

 should be done as to technical periodicals relating to 

 each of the principal branches of industry. A 

 periodical, for example, devoted to electrical engineering, 

 or to certain branches of it, jointly edited by the most 

 eminent British, French, and Italian electricians, pub- 

 lished by three of the principal publishing firms of the 

 three countries, which would publish articles in the 

 language of the respective authors, but accompanying 

 the text, where this is English or Italian, with the 

 French translation : think .how efficacious a work 

 could be done in the way of maintaining in continual 

 mutual contact our engineers and our manufacturers, 

 of making known and introducing in each country the 

 products of the others, of organising in the three 

 countries all the production in that particular branch 

 of industry, of settling and forming the due arrange- 

 ments for facing German competition. Suppose 

 that such "Ententist" periodicals — perhaps with the 

 financial co-operation of the larger industrial firms in 

 each line, for whom the sum required for the purpose 

 would be but a trifle — sprang up in each of the principal 

 branches of industry and commerce. Who does not 



