168 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LI. No. 1311 



lections were destined for the Victoria Memor- 

 ial Museum, of Ottawa, and interdepartmental 

 cooperation was desirable in publishing the re- 

 sults. An Arctic Biological Committee was 

 appointed jointly by the two services, to select 

 specialists to report on the various groups of 

 specimens represented in the collections of the 

 expedition, to distribute the specimens, and 

 ■arrange for the final publication of the reports. 

 This committee consisted of: Chairman, Pro- 

 fessor E. E. Prince, commissioner of Dominion 

 Fisheries; secretary, Mr. James M. Macoun. 

 C.M.G., botanist and chief of the biological 

 division of the Geological Survey; Professor 

 A. B. Macallum, chairman of the Commission 

 for Scientific and Industrial Research; Dr. C. 

 Gordon Hewitt, Dominion Entomologist, of the 

 Department of Agriculture, and Dr. R. M. 

 Anderson, zoologist of the Geological Survey 

 and lately chief of the Southern Party of the 

 expedition, representing the expedition. Each 

 member of the committee was made responsible 

 for the editing of reports in his own section, 

 and Dr. R. M. Anderson was appointed general 

 editor of the reports. This committee has been 

 at work for nearly three years, but owing to 

 the difficulty of securing the services of the 

 fifty or more competent specialists needed to 

 :Work up the reports, on account of the exi- 

 gencies of war and other reasons, the first of 

 the technical reports was not issued from the 

 press until July 10, 1919. 

 I These biological reports, and to a. large ex- 

 tent the geological and ethnological reports 

 which it is hoped will follow them, were mainly 

 the results of the work of the scientists of the 

 •Southern Party of the expedition, owing to 

 the unfortunate death or elimination from 

 work of most of the scientific staff of the 

 Northern Party of the expedition and the total 

 loss of their collections with the Karluh in 

 1914. As a result the later activities of the 

 remainder of that party were practically all 

 geographical and other work and collections 

 merely incidental. The small amount of frag- 

 mentary material which was brought back in 

 1918 has in most cases been included in the 

 reports issued, but in some cases a separate 

 paper will be issued. 



The plan adopted by the committee is to issue 

 the report on each group or subject as a sepa- 

 rate paper, of the regular octavo size which 

 has been found to be the most convenient and 

 popular for modern scientific papers. Most of 

 the papers are illustrated by line drawings or 

 half-tone engravings from photographs, and in 

 some cases by helioitype or colored plates, illus- 

 trating many new species and a few new 

 genera. These papers are mostly too technical 

 to be of interest to the general reader, and the 

 separates are intended to be distributed at 

 time of issue to specialists interested in the 

 particular branch covered, and 1,000 copies of 

 each paper are to be kept by the government 

 and bound into volumes for distribution to 

 public libraries, universities, colleges and other 

 scientific institutions. Eight volumes have 

 been arranged for the biological series, includ- 

 ing reports on mammalogy, ornithology, ich- 

 thyology and invertebrate marine biology, ento- 

 mology and botany, and the parts as issued are 

 numbered as parts of these volumes. They are 

 not issued in consecutive order, but each part 

 is printed as it is ready, in order to avoid delay 

 in making the knowledge available to the sci- 

 entific world and to the public. The amount 

 of specimens and data available and the char- 

 acter and scientific reputation of the special- 

 ists engaged in the work promise to make this 

 the most extensive and comprehensive publi- 

 cation on Canadian and western Arctic biology 

 since Richardson and Swainson's " Fauna 

 Boreali-Americana " (1829-31) and Hooker's 

 "Flora Boreali-Americana" (1840). 



The volumes in preparation are as follows: 



yolume I: General Introduction and Narrative. 



. A. Northern Party. 

 B. Soutihern Party. 



Volume II: A. Mammals. B. Birds. 



Volume III: Insects. (10 parts.) 



Volume IV: Botany. (Cryptogams) (5 parts). 



Volume V: Botany. (Phanerogams.) 



Volume VI: Fishes, Tunioates, etc. (2 parts.) 



Volume VII: Crustacea, (12 parts.) 



Volume VIII: Mollusks, Eohinoderma, Coelenter- 



, ates, etc. (9 parts.) 



Volume IX: Annelids, Parasitic Worms, Proto- 

 zoans, etc. (12 parts.) 



Volume X: Plankton, Hydrography, Tddes, etc. 



