NA TURE 



241 



THURSDAY, JULY 13, 1893. 



ORDER OR CHAOS? 

 '■"P HE question as to how the vast mass of scientific 

 -1- work which is now annually produced can be most 

 readily sifted and utilised is a matter of pressing import- 

 ance. There are two opposite types of scientific men who 

 fail in achieving all of which they are capable, because 

 t hey respectively pay too much and too little regard to 

 the work of their predecessors and contemporaries. The 

 one class are pre-eminently students. Masters of the 

 past history of their subject, they are familiar also with its 

 latest developments, but in the effort to know what others 

 have done, they not unfrequently e.xhaust energies which 

 might have been better spent in adding to knowledge. 

 To such men a well-ordered scheme for bringing the re- 

 sults of research into a small compass would be a most 

 valuable boon. Of the other type are those who declare, 

 " I never read ; if I want to know a thing it is easier to 

 find out all about it in the laboratory than in the library." 

 Whether this is so or not is largely a question of tempera- 

 ment, but there is no doubt that as matters now stand the 

 task of repeating work which has already been done is often 

 less distasteful and scarcely more wasteful of time and 

 energy than the effort to discover if the question has been 

 previously attacked, and if so, by whom and with what 

 results. 



In providing for the future it must be remembered that 

 the art of scientific investigation is now taught at many 

 educational centres. Students are turned out by the score 

 who are not only capable of using ordinary laboratory 

 instruments to good effect, but who have taken part in 

 original research. Within a year or two they settle down 

 as masters in schools, mechanics' institutes, or " Poly- 

 technics," or are absorbed in some branch of technology. 

 Whether or no they are to spend their lives in a dull 

 routine of teaching or testing, falling gradually further 

 and further behind the times, or whether they are to aid 

 or even to follow the advance of knowledge depends 

 largely upon the facilities for acquiring information which 

 are afforded to them. They leave the University, or the 

 University College, with its well-stocked library, and 

 forthwith their touch or want of touch with the oiiter 

 world depends almost entirely on the periodic literature 

 of the science to which they have devoted themselves. 



Such persons constitute a class which has only lately 

 come into existence, which will increase largely in the future. 

 Their wants must be considered if any improvement 

 in the organisation of our scientific publications is taken 

 in hand. It follows naturally from the spread of scientific 

 education that the results of scientific study must be 

 made more accessible than heretofore. It is not only the 

 leisured amateur or the distinguished Professor who 

 "knows the ropes" who are to be provided with ready 

 access to knowledge. If a man who does not believe 

 that his student days are over when he leaves college 

 has the right of enirde to some first-rate library, and is 

 free from the calls of business at the hours when it is 

 open, he may study modern science there. If he re- 

 members or can easily find out in what volume of the 

 " Phil. Trans." or Wiedemann s Annalen the paper 



NO. 1237, VOL. 48"! 



he requires was published, if he or his bookseller knows 

 who to write to for a separate copy, and lastly, if he can 

 afford the money to buy it, it is no doubt possible even 

 when far from libraries to bring together the literature of 

 any given subject. It is, however, contended that in 

 all this there is an unnecessary waste of time and trouble, 

 that there ought to be a recognised index, in which refer- 

 ences to all that was known on any particular point at 

 some given date are collected, and that each science 

 should be served by some single journal or group of 

 journals with clearly defined functions, in which all that is 

 required in the description and pubhcation of the results 

 of later inquiry may be found. 



The letter from Mr. Swinburne, which we published 

 recently, thus raises a larger issue than that with which he 

 chiefly dealt. The Royal Society has for some decades 

 published an admirable name index to scientific literature. 

 The task is rapidly growing beyond the powers of a single 

 society, or indeed of a single country. It is only by the 

 munificence of a wealthy and public-spirited Fellow that 

 it can be carried on at all. Has not the time come 

 when there should be an International Bureau, engaged 

 on a full subject-catalogue, divided into separate parts 

 devoted to different sciences so that the student of any 

 one of them might obtain at a moderate cost an index to 

 past research on his subject ? 



As regards the question chiefly discussed by Mr. Swin- 

 burne, viz. the publication of papers on Physics, it may 

 perhaps be laid down that there are three classes of 

 papers which require different treatment. First are those 

 which should be published in full. They are at present 

 found in the Philosophical Transactions and Proceed- 

 ings of the Royal Society, in the Philosophical Magazine, 

 in the Proceedings of the Physical Society, in the 

 Reports of the British Association, and in the Transactions 

 of the Cambridge and the Manchester Philosophical 

 Societies. To these may be added the journals of the 

 principal Scotch and Iiish societies, with which for the 

 present we do not deal. The same author not unfre- 

 quently publishes the same facts several times over in 

 several of these periodicals, or publishes fragments of 

 what is practically one seiies of researches in different 

 journals. No greater state of chaos can be imagined. 



Where a man publishes depends not upon the con- 

 venience of his readers, but upon whether his paper is 

 ready in March for the Royal Society, or in September 

 for the British Association, upon whether he cares more 

 for a discussion at the " Physical" than for the honours of 

 large type and quarto pages in the Transactions ; upon 

 whether he dreads anticipation, or is content to make 

 the leisurely announcements which prove that he has the 

 field to himself. 



The second class of papers are those which are only 

 worth publication in abstract. The Royal Society occa- 

 sionally adopts this form of publication, but other 

 societies for the most part either accept or reject a 

 paper in toto. 



The third class of paper is that which is a criti- 

 cism or discussion of what is known rather than a 

 description of an original research. At present these 

 appear chiefly in the Philosophical Magazine and in our 

 own columns. It is, however, with regard to the first 

 two classes that the need for organisation is most keenly 



