Editors’ Table. 151 
EDITORS’ TABLE. 
New popular scientific journals are appearing or are announced 
from time to time. We have received the first number of the 
American Geologist, which is published at Minneapolis. As its 
title implies, its field embraces geology and all the immediately 
allied and subordinate sciences. Its editorial corps embraces some 
of our most able and accomplished geologists. It deserves success, 
and our country is large enough to ensure this, if its people are 
sufficiently interested in the subject to subscribe for it. 
Another important journal is announced by a New York com- 
pany, to be called Garden and Forest, which is to be a Journal of 
Horticulture, Landscape Art, and Forestry. Its editors are to be 
Professors ©. S. Sargent and W. G. Farlow, of Harvard, and 
Professor A. S. Packard, of Brown. This journal is designed for 
a comparatively wealthy constituency, and will not be, apparently, 
exclusively scientific, although its editorial corps is highly so. 
So far as the publication of new scientific journals is concerned, 
we cannot have too many of them if they are well backed or sus- 
tained, financially. Unless this be the case, however, we regret the 
loss of time and labor which they cause to their projectors and con- 
tributors. Experts in science are not sufficiently numerous in this 
country to enable us to spare any of them for popular work, unless 
they are so compensated as to prevent any actual loss to their scien- 
tific efficiency. It may be safely assumed that every really merito- 
rious work of a specialist which is produced in this country will 
have ten translators, even if his work reaches the American public 
by way of Europe, before it is appreciated. Tt is easier to compile 
than to produce. 
We have had some experience of the financial aspect of the ques- 
tion. The perils are many and various. The NATURALIST, although 
now in its twenty-second year, has escaped shipwreck by little less 
than a miracle several times. But the maxim, “ while there is life 
there is hope,” has been as often verified, and the vigorous consti- 
tution which comes of—modesty forbids us to say just what—has 
triumphed, while many of our contemporaries have “joined the 
majority ”—of popular scientific journals. 
