370 
pari passu with a fading of the ink used in 
printing which was, initially, of a very indif- 
ferent quality in all respects. 
Now, if we take the best newspapers of the 
country as a whole, it goes without saying that 
they do and will carry the great bulk of reli- 
able contemporary history of this war. They 
obtain their war news direct from a dozen or 
more of the very best and most reliable sources; 
and while they may make errors on any par- 
ticular day with respect to such news, those 
errors are invariably corrected, in the same 
media, usually within short periods afterwards. 
A surprisingly large number of our news- 
papers aré now printed on the very worst paper 
imaginable and with inks that fade and blunt 
the type. All this makes for the prompt and 
permanent destruction of current history, and 
especially of the military history of the war. 
So much for the newspapers; but that is not 
the worst of it, for what applies to newspapers 
is equally pertinent with respect to book and 
current literature generally. Books of the 
greatest possible value representing the litera- 
ture of every department of science and re- 
search, of history and current fiction, and 
many other lines, are now being printed with 
blunt type on the most perishable kinds of 
wood paper, and bound in such ways that they 
.go to pieces in an incredibly short space of 
time. This stricture not only applies to what 
is being done along such lines in this coun- 
try, but likewise by most of the nations that 
are doing any publishing in Europe. 
In other words, we are not making books on 
standard or any other kind of literature nearly 
as good, in so far as their lasting qualities are 
concerned, as they did in the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries. This fact I recently 
touched upon in an article I published in the 
Medical Review of Reviews of New York 
City, on the “ Incunabula in the Library of the 
Army Medical Museum of the Surgeon Gener- 
al’s Office.” Few studies in books are more 
interesting than to make such comparisons as 
these; take some of the best volumes for in- 
stance published in 1450 and compare them 
with any of the best works in contemporary 
science and mark the difference. 
SCIENCE 
[N. S. Vou. XLVIII. No. 1241 
It is truly marvelous to note the general 
quality of the work they put out in those 
early days—now nearly five hundred years ago. 
To be sure the illustrations are generally crude, 
while the binding, paper and printing are far 
and away ahead of fully fifty per cent. of the 
same kind of output of the present time. 
No one of my present acquaintance is more 
familiar with all these matters than Mr. Felix 
Neumann, of the Library of the Surgeon Gen- 
eral’s Office, and he has, a few days ago, been so 
good as to submit me the following notes on 
the subject which have never been used in any 
other connection heretofore. Mr. Neumann 
points out that: 
Periodicals and newspapers, the latter very im- 
portant sources of contemporary history, are 
printed on such poor paper that it is very doubt- 
ful how long they will last and how long they can 
be preserved in libraries. In some libraries they 
are kept, as a matter of protection, in an entirely 
dry room and not loaned for use in private resi- 
dences. As these periodicals and newspapers are 
of the greatest importance, it is desirable that 
those copies to be deposited in libraries should be 
printed on special and more durable paper. In 
England, for instance, there exists a law issued in 
the seventeenth century that the copies designated 
for the library of the king and for the libraries of 
Cambridge and Oxford, should be printed ‘‘on the 
best and largest paper.’’ 
An indifferent paper had already been in use at 
different periods. For instance, in the first half of 
the seventeenth century, during the Thirty Years 
War, the durability was not to be blamed so much 
as the poor quality of the paper. Many of the 
books printed during this period were printed on 
a brown paper. Such matters became still worse 
in the seventies of the last century, at which time 
many publications were printed on paper made 
from wood-pulp which at that time came into 
vogue. In consequence of this indifferent manu- 
facture many books and bound volumes of scien- 
tifie periodicals had to be reprinted by an an- 
astatic process, as the originals had fallen to 
pieces. 
The deterioration of printed paper of poor qual- 
ity depends greatly on the influence exerted by 
light and heat, although paper of better quality 
suffers sometimes from the same reasons. Taking 
all this into consideration, it is advisable that the 
government should supervise the examination of all 
