July 13, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



61 



it may undergo considerable modification. 

 It is difficult to see how tliis can be avoided, 

 and it is difficult to see how reprints can be 

 cited otherwise than with reference to them- 

 selves and their original sources, but a 

 great deal of confusion may be avoided if 

 writers who have occasion to refer to re- 

 prints (in contrast to separates) will always 

 indicate that they have done so. 



We have fortunately in large part passed 

 the age of secondary titles, and it is a mat- 

 ter for congratulation that it is now rarely 

 necessary, when using a new book, to give 

 a secondary or still more subordinate title 

 as a means of specifying the particular work 

 referred to ; and the citation of older books 

 makes the occasion for thankfulness that 

 this is so, very evident to all who use the 

 library. In one respect, however, a great 

 improvement is needed. Librarians, who 

 are a very practical set of people whose pur- 

 pose now is to make any book quickly acces- 

 sible to anyone who knows either its author, 

 title or subject, have adopted somewhat 

 arbitrary but very serviceable rules for cat- 

 aloguing and cross-referring, intended to 

 secure this end. With an isolated book 

 comparatively little difficulty is found, but 

 between distinct books, and articles in 

 proceedings or other periodicals, there is 

 an insensible intergradation, owing to the 

 publication of series of various degrees of 

 complexity, which are calculated either for 

 the convenience of a certain class of readers, 

 the gloi'ification of the author or the emol- 

 ument of the publisher, or are necessitated 

 by the great development of institutional 

 research and publication. 



I do not wish to cite examples of terrible 

 things to be avoided, which even a casual 

 inspection of the contents of any large 

 library reveals, but I should not wish to 

 pass the subject by without calling atten- 

 tion to the very great need of editorial re- 

 form which devolves upon those who are 

 charged with publishing series, and partic- 



ularly those whose publication responsibility 

 is so great as to force upon them the un- 

 questionably necessary establishment of 

 such differentiated series. In a late num- 

 ber of the monthly Public Libraries, Mr. 

 Eeinick presents a suggestive statement of 

 a librarian's difficulties in the arrangement 

 and cataloguing of the United States Gov- 

 ernment documents, which is worthy of 

 perusal not only by librarians, but by per- 

 sons who have occasion to cite such docu- 

 ments and those who are concerned with 

 their publication. Some four years since, 

 Mr. Frank Campbell, of the library of the 

 British Museum, published a series of 

 essays under the collective title 'The Theory 

 of National and International Bibliography,' 

 in which the question here raised is given 

 instructive if perhaps not always final 

 treatment. No one who has occasion either 

 to arrange, catalogue or use the publica- 

 tions of the various branches of the Indian 

 Government or of our own Government, or 

 the publications of our several states, or of 

 the agricultural experiment stations with 

 which each of these states is now provided, 

 or, finally, the contributions which are 

 emanating from the more important re- 

 search centers, chiefly in the form of sepa- 

 rates or reprints of articles originally pub- 

 lished in magazines or the proceedings of 

 learned bodies, can fail to see at once the 

 necessity for a collective treatment of all 

 publications organically connected in their 

 origin, and the fact that Mr. Reinick's de- 

 vice of stamps by which the librarian can 

 supply necessary information not pi'inted 

 on the title page is necessitated if the mem- 

 bers of a given series are to be unquestion- 

 ably brought together, carries between the 

 lines a suggestive commentai-y on the ex- 

 isting facts. 



I hope that I have sufficiently brought 

 out my own belief that the writer, the edi- 

 tor and the publisher, who frequently work 

 independently of one another, are in real- 



