EDITORIAL COMMENT. 
Card Catalogue Summaries. — The last twenty-five years have 
been noteworthy for the active and successful efforts in organizing the 
ever-increasing literature of the natural sciences, and the publication 
of magazines devoted exclusively to the listing of new contributions 
is now a well-established feature of natural-history work. The advan- 
tage of interpolation which the card catalogue system has over the 
book form of publication is gradually being recognized, and we may 
now be said to be fairly launched in an experiment for the card cata- 
loguing of all zoological literature. The immensity of such an under- 
taking can be appreciated from the rate at which the card catalogue 
now issued by the Concilium Bibliographicum at Zurich has grown, 
and by the largeness of even the more moderate of the proposals in 
the scheme advanced by the Royal Society of London. One of the 
difficulties which all these projects meet is that of getting at the sub- 
stance of a paper for the purposes of classification. Although the 
rhetorical title is largely a thing of the past, the best contrived title 
is not always sufficient to indicate the full scope of a paper, and 
recourse must be made, even for simple bibliographical classification, 
to the body of the work itself. The growing custom of concluding 
each paper with a brief summary helps much in this respect, but it 
is inferior, .in our opinion, to the plan now being pursued by the 
editor of the American Journal of Physiology. ‘This consists in the 
issuance with each number of the journal of a sheet of index slips for 
the contributions published in the given number. Each slip is headed 
by a full bibliographical reference for the paper which it represents, 
followed by a very brief abstract (not more than 125 words) of the 
substance of the paper, and so compactly printed that the whole slip 
can be pasted, if desired, on a card for catalogue arrangement. This 
plan possesses the great advantage of having the abstracting done by 
the author himself, and yet under restrictions as to length from the 
editor, so that a uniform slip is obtained which is perhaps the most 
serviceable form in which the paper could be presented for classifica- 
tion. Should all journals which publish original scientific matter 
adopt this plan, we feel sure that the work of the scientific bibli- 
ographer would be immensely aided ; nor are we inclined to believe 
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