408 
NATURE 
[JANUARY 25, 1917 
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 
[The Editor does not hold himself responsible for 
opinions expressed by his correspondents. Neither 
can he undertake to return, or to correspond with 
the writers of, rejected manuscripts intended for 
this or any other part of Nature. No notice is 
taken of anonymous communications.] 
A Plea for a Scientific Quadruple Entente. 
Tuart result of the present war which will, without 
the slightest doubt, have the most important conse- 
quences for the future is the evidence it has brought 
to the nations of the Entente of the terrible danger 
that they have run of being victims of German hege- 
mony in all fields of human activity—economic, tech- 
nical, and scientific. ‘This danger has diminished since 
the war burst upon us; it was very great during the 
long time of peace that preceded the war, but the war 
warded it off just in time, and the nations of the 
Entente have hastened to adopt as remedies all kinds 
of measures of initiative—governmental and private— 
which will certainly be successful. Thus, new indus- 
tries have been created, and we are preparing to create 
others, to make ourselves independent of Germany in 
the. manufacture of certain products of the greatest 
importance that Germany used almost exclusively to 
furnish. Again, we are now seeking means to protect 
ourselves against the ‘‘dumping” of German products 
after the war to the detriment of our national pro- 
ducts. Again, institutions and other means are being 
created expressly to make still closer that co-operation 
of science and technology which has worked miracles 
in Germany. Finally, after having become convinced 
of the power which, as we see by the domination of 
great enterprises, dwells in organisation, we have 
undertaken to formulate and spread abroad the funda- 
mental practical principles of organisation for whom- 
soever can, and should, learn and apply them in any 
branch of the work of society. 
This pacific war of liberation from German _ hege- 
mony, that is being prepared even during this bloody 
war and that must be continued more vigorously 
than ever after peace comes, must also be carried into 
the scientific domain, of which also Germany was 
gradually taking sole control. The numberless 
Archivs, Jahrbiicher, Zeitschriften, Zentralblatter, and 
so on, which have been yearly increasing in number 
and volume, have gradually monopolised the whole of 
the scientific production of the world by gathering 
widely, and even demanding, the collaboration of 
learned men of all countries. Thus were apparently 
built up international scientific organs, but in reality 
German instruments of control and monopoly of 
science. 
It fis, then, in this domain that it seems necessary 
to prepare and begin our pacific war of liberation from 
German predominance. I am far from wishing that, 
after peace is concluded, we should try to keep alive 
the hatred that has been stirred up by the war. The 
friends of science would wish to do so less than any- 
body. Rather, if the war leads—and it can and must 
lead—to the establishment of the principles of liberty 
of peoples and of respect for those of nationality and 
international justice, which can safeguard the peace 
of the world for a long time to come, it will be one of 
the chief tasks of science gradually to appease this 
hatred and to attempt to place this co-operation be- 
tween various nations, and that feeling of international 
solidarity and human brotherhood upon which we 
seemed rightly to pride ourselves towards the end of 
the last century, on its old bases. which shall have 
become firmer because more just. But when we reflect 
that one of the motives which have been the most 
NO. 2465, VoL. 98] 
powerful in driving Germany to war has certainly been 
an immoderate pride and the pretension, which appears 
to us so ridiculous and was yet put forth by them 
in all seriousness, of being the chosen people, called 
upon by God to organise other peoples and show them 
the way towards a higher civilisation, the plan of 
taking away from Germany its hegemony in the scien- 
tific domain to arrive thus at lowering its unmeasured 
pride and its too high opinion of itself will appear as 
one of the surest means of guaranteeing peace for 
the future. 
To take from Germany its scientific hegemony, one 
of the most suitable, efficacious, and prompt meams is, 
it seems, the creation in each of the principal 
branches of science of ‘‘ Archives,” ‘‘ Year-Books,”’ and 
“ Journals ’’ in general, which are international in so 
far as collaboration and content are concerned, but 
which are edited and published in the countries of the 
Entente. As an eloquent symptom of that reaction 
against the stifling of the scientific production of the 
world thus exercised by Germany, we need only men- 
tion the recent creation at Petrograd of Archives russes 
d’Anatomie, d’Histologie et d’Embryologie, the very’ 
object of which is to permit Russian investigators to 
do without German publications. 
The editing of each of these proposed publications 
ought to be done by representatives from the four 
countries: Great Britain, France, Russia, and Italy, 
and, if necessary, ought to have the moral and mate- 
rial support of the Ministers of Public Instruc- 
tion and the most important scientific societies in 
these countries. Also the publishing should be en- 
trusted to a society of four publishers chosen from 
among the principal ones of each country. Finally, 
each author should have the right to publish his work 
in his own language, but the articles not written in 
French should be followed, for the convenience of 
others, by their French translations—French being 
known to most educated people of all nations. 
However, we ought not servilely to imitate the 
corresponding publications of Germany. Anyone who 
is even slightly acquainted with these publications will 
not have failed to notice a marked deterioration, in the 
case of most of them, in the course of the last few 
years. In fact, it is only too evident that their object 
was, not to spread many ideas or to make known the 
most interesting results of really important scientific 
researches, but to produce each year a certain number 
of hundredweights of printed paper, to the great profit 
of German publishing houses, if not to the honour of 
German science. The noticeable deterioration of these 
German publications is, then, due above all to the 
system of production on a large scale applied to the 
book-industry. But it is also favoured by the exces- 
sively analytic spirit of the Germans, which robs them 
of broad views and a resulting true perspective of 
things, and predisposes them to put on the same plane 
the whole of a collection of facts and researches in 
which nobody can distinguish what is very important 
from what is less important or not important at all. 
The projected Entente publications must, then, in 
the first place, print less and select better. Then thev 
must direct their attention to both synthesis and 
analysis; that is, they must always contain synthetic 
articles which attempt to group, at the moment of 
publication, the relations of analytical researches to 
the ideas or theories which will have been. the inspirers 
and guides of those researches, and of which the 
seeker will have been more or less conscious. They 
must take account even of those researches which 
come from isolated thinkers who work on their own 
account and at one another’s suggestion. Lastly, they 
must put the various writings into their correct plane 
by publishing at length the most important ones, 
giving long summaries of those which are less impor- 
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