318 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. ZLV. No. 1161 



with octavo pamphlets. The publishers of 

 some other periodicals are equally accommo- 

 dating, and I have had quarto and octavo re- 

 prints made from one that has folio pages, 

 with no extra charge. 



Even before an article is set up the author 

 can take some precautions for the benefit of 

 his readers. It would be too much of a digres- 

 sion to point out many of them here, for this 

 is not an essay on how to prepare manuscripts 

 for publication;^ but attention might be called 

 to one desirable reform, namely, restricting 

 the number of joint contributions. Every book 

 or paper by two or more authors, especially if 

 new species are described in it, makes extra 

 trouble for librarians, bibliographers, biog- 

 raphers and others, as long as a copy of it 

 exists (which may be for several centuries). 

 Usually most or nearly all of the writing of a 

 joint paper is done by one of the authors, and 

 the assistance of the other can be fully ac- 

 knowledged without putting his name on the 

 title-page. In cases where one author is much 

 older or better known than the other the latter 

 doubtless feels honored in having his name 

 publicly associated with the more noted man's ; 

 but reputation is a scientist's most precious 

 possession, and no true scientist should wish 

 his to be mixed with any one else's. (^Nearly 

 all the great masterpieces of science are each 

 the work of one man.) 



For the benefit of librarians I will close with 

 a protest against the common custom of dis- 

 carding the covers and advertising pages of 

 magazines when they are ready to be bound. 

 The stock excuse for this is that it is done to 

 save space; but few scientific libraries are so 

 cramped for space that they can not spare a 

 few inches more a year for advertising pages. 

 It is very interesting to look through the outer 

 pages of old numbers of Science, for instance, 

 and see what text-books and apparatus were in 

 use at a given period, and sometimes one can 

 get valuable evidence of dates of publication 

 in that way.^ There is perhaps no better place 



2 For some valuable suggestions along this line 

 866 W. M. Davis, Pop. Sci. Monthly, 78, 237-240, 

 March, 1911. 



3 See Torreya, 7, 170 (footnote)', Aug., 1907. 



than the advertising pages of the popular lit- 

 erary magazines to trace the historical devel- 

 opment of bicycles, automobiles and innumer- 

 able other familiar articles. 



Covers help to locate articles in a volume 

 quickly when one knows the month but not the 

 page, and they often bear dates, tables of con- 

 tents, and other information that is not given 

 in the magazine proper. On the third cover 

 page of the American Journal of Science for 

 January, 18YY, an important astronomical dis- 

 covery was announced, but those who do not 

 preserve the covers can trace it back only to 

 the February number, where it was printed 

 again on the regular pages. Early in the his- 

 tory of the same magazine the covers of some 

 of the numbers bore a list of places where it 

 was kept on sale, which is of considerable in- 

 terest, including as it does some towns that 

 have now almost disappeared from the maps. 



EoLAND M. Harper 



College Point, N. T. 



SPECIAL ARTICLES 



EXPERIMENTS ON MOTOR NERVE REGENERA- 

 TION AND THE DIRECT NEUROTIZATION 

 OF PARALYZED MUSCLES BY THEIR 

 OWN AND BY FOREIGN NERVES 



During the past three years, I have been in- 

 vestigating the question of the physiological 

 regeneration of motor nerves when directly 

 implanted into paralyzed muscles, and the 

 possibility of the reestablishment of normal 

 neuro-motor connections. In these experi- 

 ments a remarkable difference in the behavior 

 of the muscles' own nerve and that of foreign 

 nerve was found. 



The experiments were made upon the nerves 

 and muscles of the thighs of rabbits. For the 

 electric stimulation a weak current from a 

 Porter induction coil was used, and the nerves 

 and muscles were always freely exposed, so that 

 the effect of the direct stimulation of one or 

 both could be carefully controlled. It is hardly 

 necessary to state that exi)eriments of this 

 kind must be done with great care, that re- 

 generation of divided nerves must be prevented 

 when so desired by extensive resections of the 

 nerves, and that the operator must be certain 



