Septembeb 14, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



263 



The smaller stone fell in a cultivated field 

 ■without breaking and is said to have pene- 

 trated the soil about two feet. This stone is 

 variously described as about 10 x 14 x 3 or 4 

 inches, 17 or 18 inches by 9x9 inches and 

 21 X 11 s 11 inches at larger end, sloping in 

 two directions to a wedge shape with rounded 

 corners. This piece was said to be entirely 

 covered with crust and to have weighed from 

 75 to 85 pounds. 



The man who extracted it from the earth 

 informs me that it was so cold that frost im- 

 mediately formed on its surface when exposed 

 to the air. 



The Public Museum of the City of Mil- 

 waukee has obtained the bulk of the larger 

 mass which will be analyzed and duly pub- 

 lished. It probably wiU be distributed in ex- 

 change with several museums. 



The stone is of a light gray groundmass, 

 apparently largely feldspathic, containing very 

 few chondrules and thickly shot with pyr- 

 rhotite varying from specks a fraction of a 

 millimeter to more or less globular masses 

 5 mm. in diameter. It exhibits sundry black 

 veins and armored surfaces. Its crust shows 

 considerable variation on difiierent pieces, 

 some of which are deeply pitted and others 

 comparatively smooth. 



This is, I believe, the sixth meteorite known 

 from the state of Wisconsin and will be known 

 as the Colby meteorite. 



Henry L. Ward 



Public Museum op the 

 City op Milwaukee, 

 July 31, 1917 



FILING PAMPHLETS 



The communications relative to filing re- 

 prints, bulletins and other pamphlets have 

 been read with considerable interest by the 

 writer and further suggestions are offered. 



Having been in experiment station work 

 for a number of years and being on the mail- 

 ing lists of a large number of stations, the 

 literature, particularly bulletins and circulars, 

 has been accumulating rapidly. Of these, 

 there may be many which may be of no im- 

 mediate interest and attempts have been made 



repeatedly to find some system for filing and 

 indexing them, which will give a maximum 

 of usefulness with a minimum of work in 

 arranging and filing. Many of the various 

 systems have been tried with the result that 

 owing to the time required for arranging, one 

 becomes confronted with an almost hopeless 

 stack of publications if the work be neglected 

 even for a short time. 



Numbering in the order of acquisition was 

 early abandoned, on account of the time nec- 

 essary for preparing index cards and the 

 cross refernces which sooner or later become 

 inevitable, and the resulting jumbled mass of 

 publications on the shelves. Filing according 

 to origin, as by experiment station in the 

 case of such publications, was tried, but this, 

 too, required a card index and, as in the for- 

 mer system, the necessary picking over of the 

 entire shelves when a number of publications 

 on one subject were desired. Filing by author 

 led to the same results. It was finally con- 

 cluded that in order to obtain a higher degree 

 of efiiciency it would be necessary to combine 

 indexing with filing, thus doing away with a 

 large number of indexing cards, and at the 

 same time some of the deficiencies of the other 

 systems of filing. This conclusion led to a 

 search for a fairly complete scheme of classi- 

 fication. The Dewey system was consulted 

 and was found wanting, particularly because 

 the division agriculture was not classified 

 finely enough. The solution of the problem 

 was found in the scheme of classification of 

 the Library of Congress. This may be pro- 

 cured from the Superintendent of Documents 

 at a small price and answers the purpose very 

 well. 



In using this scheme, the publications are 

 numbered according to the class number of 

 the subject and placed in the proper filing 

 boxes for each particular subject or subjects. 

 Where a pamphlet contains information on 

 more than one subject it is only necessary : 

 to prepare a cross reference card of fairly 

 large size and file it in its proper place among 

 the publications. To prevent " burying " of 

 a publication, a register is used in which the 

 publications are listed according to their origin 



