July 19, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



75 



If the first of these two questions is an- 

 swered in the affirmative, the working body 

 created and necessarj^ means seciired, then 

 the details of the plan can safely be left for 

 that body. 



The Eoyal Society gave as the date, when 

 the work ought to be in shape to begin, the 

 year 1900 ; and I think that year is none 

 too far away, as the necessary preparations, 

 as a matter of course, Mali take some years. 



It was proposed, and specially by Mr. G. 

 Brown G-oode, in his very full and suggest- 

 ive article, that an International Congress of 

 Science be organized, something of the same 

 character as the American and British As- 

 sociations for the Advancement of Science. I 

 agree fully with this proposal of an interna- 

 tional congress. But I would make its 

 scope more narrow and to the point, an In- 

 ternational Congress of Ilibliography. And to 

 prepare for this, I would suggest that there 

 be started right here an organization com- 

 mittee to consult with interested bodies and 

 persons both in America and in the Euro- 

 pean countries. Will the Editor of Science 

 take this matter in his hands and call such 

 a committee ? 



Aksel G. S. Josephson. 



Lenox Library, New York. 



a caed catalogue of scientific 

 liteeatuee. 

 The valuable papers that have appeared 

 in Science on the practicability of a card 

 catalogue of scientific literature have awak- 

 ened a deep interest in the subject among 

 those who feel how desirable a work of this 

 kind would be to each individual worker in 

 the field of science. Already an immense 

 amount of scientific literature has accumu- 

 lated which needs to be brought together in 

 such a manner as to be readily accessible 

 to the investigator, and, when we consider 

 the rate at which it is increasing, the neces- 

 sity for adopting and putting into operation 

 some plan by which the users of scientific 



literature may be able to find all that has 

 been written upon a given subject per- 

 taining to science becomes strikingly ap- 

 parent. 



The writer has been engaged in prepar- 

 ing a bibliography and index of certain 

 subjects for several months past, and the 

 desire that the results and such tentative 

 deductions as may be drawn from them 

 may be added to our knowledge of the ac- 

 tual possibilities of a catalogue of scientific 

 literature, and that other workers in this 

 line may be induced to give us their experi- 

 ence, represents the object of this commu- 

 nication. The work just referred to was 

 begun without previous training in this 

 special line and with somewhat indefinite 

 ideas as to what might be accomplished in 

 the time that could be devoted to it. The 

 opinions that have been formed during its 

 progress, in their bearing on the present 

 discussion, will first be stated before describ- 

 ing in some detail the scope and character 

 of the work that is now being carried on. 



1. The card catalogue, it has been said, 

 has its limitations. This must be evident 

 to every one when it is considered that 

 such a catalogue as has been recommended 

 to the Eoyal Society by the Harvard Uni- 

 versity Committee will extend over a series 

 of years and must inevitably become bulkj^ 

 and unwieldy even when applied to but a 

 single branch of science. Then, too, some- 

 thing more than a bibliography is becoming 

 necessary. This is readily seen when one 

 considers the time and labor expended in 

 frequently running through a long list of 

 titles of papers in order to find what has 

 been written on a given subject. 



2. Such a work should be published in 

 book form after the close of each year and 

 contain a bibliogi-aphic catalogue and a 

 subject index. It is unnecessary that the 

 indexing should be carried to the extreme, 

 but simply to gather together under each 

 special division of every branch of science 



