EDITORIAL. 
The Aim of the American Naturalist. — The thirty-second volume 
of the American Naturalist, which commences with the present num- 
ber, will be the first entire volume to appear under the new manage- 
ment. It may not, therefore, be inappropriate at this time to state 
once more the motive which has induced us to assume control of the 
magazine, 
Every enterprise that hopes to be successful must be conducted 
with some one definite aim in view. From the range of subjects 
covered by the Naturalist it may be supposed by many that the 
magazine is to be a kind of scrap basket for a miscellaneous lot of 
articles which, for one reason or another, have failed to find space in 
the journals of the special sciences to which they rightly belong. 
This is just what we most earnestly desire to avoid. We wish to 
select our articles so that the magazine shall have a definite charac- 
ter, with each department working in harmony with all the rest. 
What, then, is to be the basis of selection? What common point of 
view shall cement its diverse departments into a harmonious whole? 
There was a time, hardly antedating the foundation of this journal, 
when one man might be equally eminent as a zoologist, a botanist, 
and a geologist. Many of the most distinguished names in science 
are borne by men whose activities ranged over all of these broad 
fields. But the conditions have been so changed by the rapid accu- 
mulation of knowledge during the last half-century that in order to 
attain any success a man must devote his attention to a narrow 
field; and, instead of becoming naturalists in the broad sense of the 
term, we see men becoming lepidopterists, coleopterists, ornitholo- 
gists, embryologists, and the like, devoting their entire attention to 
one small group of animals or plants, to a narrow line of investiga- 
tion in morphology or physiology, or studying exclusively some small 
class of phenomena in geology or mineralogy. Instead of the general 
scientific journals and societies of natural history of former times, 
these conditions have called into life and elevated to the highest 
prominence societies and journals dealing with the special problems 
-of restricted lines of research. Such conditions obtain to-day, and 
must continue to influence the course of investigation so long as 
unknown facts remain to be discovered. 
