140 
significant or predominant words for pur- 
poses of more minute sub-division. The 
Committee surely does not suppose that the 
sorting clerks and the libraries arranging 
the cards can attain, by significant words, a 
logical arrangement of the matter, such as 
is'shown on the next to the last page of 
the zoological schedules, involving, as it 
does, the knowledge that the ‘retina’ goes 
with the sense organs, while ‘ Kars of Man 
and other Primaries’ is a mere question of 
external facial morphology. The new sys- 
tem would, as we have seen, require a much 
larger staff of employees than would be 
necessary with the decimal system ; this 
peculiar use of catch-words would make it, 
furthermore, necessary to employ trained 
zoologists for mere mechanical sorting. 
Moreover, I venture to state that the Com- 
mittee would be astounded with the results 
of the simple experiment of classifying a 
few thousand cards, as proposed in the in- 
troduction to the zoological schedules. This 
matter is extremely difficult to explain in 
‘words, but the experiment is most convinc- 
ing. It would be found notably that there 
would be a conflict between the systematic 
and the topical catch-words and that the bib- 
liography would be rendered useless for a 
vast number of questions that it might other- 
wise answer. 
Uniformity is regarded as no virtue by the 
Committee. This again proves how im- 
possible it is for one to form a just a priort 
conception of the actual work in a Bureau 
publishing a card bibliography. In the 
tables of the Concilium, Embryology is 
treated somewhat differently in the zoolog- 
ical and in the anatomical bibliographies. 
‘This error was committed before the full 
value of uniformity had been grasped. It 
has proved to be a persistent source of con- 
fusion and delay. Indeed, such misconcep- 
tions abound in the report of the Com- 
mittee. To cite one further example, the 
Committee speaks incidentally of sorting 
SCIENCE. 
[N. S. Vou. X. No. 240. 
the cards into pigeon holes, as in a post- 
office. I, too, once believed that to be 
possible and blundered for many months 
before devising the multiple check system, 
which at once precludes errors of sorting 
and more than doubles the rapidity of the 
work. 
It is not my purpose to discuss matters of 
organization in detail, but there are certain 
decisions in this regard that could not be 
passed over in silence. Regional bureaux 
organized by various countries are to pre- 
pare the manuscript, which is to be finally 
edited in London. Now a decision of the 
Congress says that the text, and not the 
titles, of the papers is to form the basis of 
classification. Therefore, one of two things 
must occur: Either the regional bureaux 
inust maintain a fully competent staff of 
specialists, and themselves attend to the 
classifying, or the specialists in London 
must consult the works a second time, thus 
rendering the operations of the regional 
bureaus useless. The Concilium Biblio- 
graphicum follows strictly this principle of 
classifying according to the text and not to 
the title. I could cite papers which took 
many hours to classify, and numerous zool- 
ogists can bear evidence that we have not 
hesitated in cases of doubt to write to them 
personally before publishing. To show the 
constant difficulties, let me mention a few 
cases that have occurred in the past week : 
Firstly, we have had three papers describing 
new species, in which the fact that they were 
new could only be ascertained by the con- 
text, and one in which the symbol n. sp. 
was appended to a species already described 
elsewhere by the same author. Secondly, 
there is a paper by Alcock and Henderson, 
published in the Annals and Magazine of 
Natural History (7) Vol. 3, p. 1-27. In 
this paper 92 species are mentioned, of 
which 31 are new and provided with new 
specific names. ‘There are, however, only 21 
descriptions given. Itis, furthermore, stated 
