August 25, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



211 



vexing question to which I may refer again in 

 a few moments. I pause merely to remark 

 that a minor academy is minor only so long 

 as you do not want its transactions in your 

 own work. 



And last in this array of forms of scientiiie 

 ptiblication comes the largest group of all, 

 newest and most insistently demanded, the 

 journals. To me the rise of the special peri- 

 odieai devoted to the interest of a special group 

 is one of the most significant social phenomena 

 of the past fifty years. Let no one here think 

 that this tendency to periodical publication is 

 confined to science or to the more learned 

 groups. By no means — the brick-layer, the 

 barber, the banker, the baker, the builder, the 

 book-binder (to keep to one letter only) all 

 have their journals fully as much as the biolo- 

 gist, the botanist, the biochemist, or even the 

 bibliographer. And they all have to be ordered, 

 entered, paid for, cataloged, bound, and stored. 

 Periodical publication is the one modern form 

 for telling the world what everybody has done 

 and what other people think albout it. We 

 take in over twenty-two hundred journals in 

 the University Library. A goodly number — do 

 you say? Well, it is just about half what 

 other libraries of our size subscribe for, and 

 about a quarter of what the Library of Con- 

 gress receives each year. Perhaps the medical 

 faculty is satisfied with its four hundred and 

 sixty-six journals received. But I fear no 

 other group really has enough. Certainly that 

 great department loosely known as the social 

 sciences does not have at hand here anything 

 like an adequate supply. I see no end to this 

 modern form of publication. Every quarter I 

 read with sadly disappointed hope the record 

 of "Births and Deaths in the Periodical 

 World" appearing in the Bulletin of Bibliog- 

 raphy. The births always outnumber the 

 deaths and the marriages of journals. My one 

 consolation is my firm conviction that wood- 

 pulp paper has a very definite limit of sta- 

 bility. But then I reflect that some chemist is 

 sure to discover some process of preserving 

 this wood-pulp mass for an indefinite period. 

 There is no way out. Journals and transac- . 

 tions, reviews and proceedings we have ever 

 with us in ever increasing numbers. These the 



investigator simply must have. Can he have 

 them all at hand currently and in bound form? 

 Obviously not, unless we multiply our library 

 budgets about ten-fold, and our storage quar- 

 ters five-fold. 



This leads us very naturally to consider this 

 problem of supplying the full record of science 

 to our men of science. It is not a local prob- 

 lem merely. It is also a national problem. 

 The difficulties in the way are partly those of 

 finance, partly those of time, partly competi- 

 tion, not alone among American libraries, but 

 with those of Japan and China, of South 

 America and South Africa, of New Zealand 

 and Australia. Very much of the material 

 required by this group before me "was pub- 

 lished in but a small edition, running fi'om a 

 couple of hundred in the case of certain very 

 costly books, to a thousand or more for certain 

 journals. In their beginnings journals and 

 transactions are frequently issued in only suf- 

 ficient nrunbers to meet the actua;l number of 

 subscribers. You all know how the waste- 

 basket yawns for odd numbers, and what 

 chances of destruction stray copies must run, 

 between careless or absent-minded ownei-s, 

 house-maids, janitors, the frugal house-wife 

 and the rag-man. Wars and disasters inter- 

 vene to reduce the num^bers of copies in exis- 

 tence. I have no hesitation in saying that the 

 possibility of securing sets of certain very 

 much valued books and journals is diminishing 

 even to the vanishing point with each year that 

 goes by. The world war was destructive of 

 reserves, caused restriction in the number of 

 copies printed, and increased enormously the 

 cost of printed matter of all sorts. In some 

 cases known to me no copies were printed be- 

 yond the actual home demand, totally ignoring 

 foreign or enemy subscribers. I know of one 

 American journal which actually printed last 

 December one hundred and fifty copies less 

 than its regular subscription list, because paper 

 took a sudden jump in price and only the stock 

 on hand was used. This sort of thing makes 

 the task of securing sets anything but easy. 

 The chief source of supply is the libraries of 

 deceased professors as they come on the mar- 

 ket — and professors who own and bind long 

 files of journals and transactions are becoming 



