July 11, 1919] 



SCIENCE 



43 



man liad fallen upon a method which, scarcely 

 differed from his except in its forms of words 

 and symbols. 



It is not known how far Collins was in the 

 confidence of Leibniz, but it has been noted 

 that following Collins's death in N'ovember, 

 1683, appeared the first 'publication of Leibniz's 

 calculus, in the " Leipzig Acts " for 1684, es- 

 sentially as it was given to JSTewton in 1677. 



Additional force is given to the supposition 

 that Leibniz saw Newton's compendiiun in 

 1673 by the similarity of the circumstances to 

 those which relate to German propaganda as 

 it has been disclosed by the recent war, a 

 similarity so striking, that one hardly realizes 

 that the period concerned is practically two 

 and one half centuries nearer the origin of 

 such methods. But the letter of " noble frank- 

 ness " with the unquestioned facts which throw 

 light upon it, are alone sufficient to bar Leib- 

 niz from the honor of an independent dis- 

 coverer, for no other reason than that, as we 

 say in the law, he does not come into court 

 with clean hands. Arthur S. Hathaway 



Purdue Univbesity 



the poor diener 



How many of us have not felt as we closed 

 an article that we may have thought good, 

 perhaps expressing perfimctory thanks to our 

 patron or instructor or some other figure in the 

 seats of the mighty who took a few minutes 

 time to send us some preparations or cultures 

 prepared by some one else in his laboratory, 

 that there was a hardworked, somewhat pa- 

 thetic humbler figure back of it all to whom 

 our thanks are far more due than to any of 

 these ? 



When you take down from the shelf a 

 carefully cleaned, carefully sterilized, cotton- 

 plugged flask and fill it up for yotu- own pur- 

 poses, and then cheerfully discard it and take 

 another because you got in a tenth of a centi- 

 meter too much, when you finish up a couple 

 of hours brisk work and then carry out a tray- 

 ful of pipettes to the " dirtroom " to be washed 

 up, and leave around a staggering array of 

 dirty glassware too bulky to bother to take out 

 yourself, when you pile up on the sterilizing 



bench a gi-eat lot of used, gone and fo-rgotten 

 cultures for some one else to autoclave, then 

 remember the poor diener. 



When you toss over a foul sample of sputum 

 with a " Here Jim, stain this up and look for 

 the bugs," or hack out a bloody mess of tissues 

 from a dead guinea pig and hand them over 

 with a curt " Shove these into Zenker, Geo''?e, 

 and rim 'em through as fast as you can," give 

 credit where credit is due. These are not 

 operations that can be carried on by any old 

 man in the street; these are true science. 



Dozens of procedures which we learned with 

 difficulty in school days, we turn over to 

 dieners and technicians, who learned the art 

 from other dieners and technicians and carry 

 it on in a clean-cut mechanical way better than 

 we could do ourselves. God help science if all 

 the dieners should unionize and go on a strike 

 to-morrow. E. R. L. 



Saranao Lake 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 



RECENT PALEOBOTANY IN GREAT BRITAIN 



The following suiTey of paleobotanical re- 

 searches published in Britain during the war 

 is necessarily superficial; it is, moreover, ob- 

 viously impossible to draw a clearly defined 

 line between work done in the period imme- 

 diately preceding the outbreak of hostilities 

 and work completed since August, 1914. No 

 mention is made of papers which, though 

 primarily concerned with recent plants, in- 

 clude references to extinct types. In spite of 

 the fact that national work of one kind or an- 

 other has absorbed, wholly or in part, energies 

 normally devoted to scientific research the 

 record of achievement amply justifies the 

 statement that the progress of paleobotanical 

 enquiry has not suffered any serious check. 

 Much has been done towards quickening the 

 spirit of research in pure science as well as 

 in relation to problems of great economic im- 

 portance: the foundations of paleobotanical 

 knowledge have been considerably strength- 

 ened and, with the access of greater oppor- 

 tunities and revived interest in research which 

 we confidently expect in the days to come, the 

 results gained during the period of storm and 



