148 



SCIENCE. 



[...S. Vol. XXI. No. 526. 



Berlin, has called attention in a recent article* 

 to the treatment of the sponges, where only 

 27 papers are included out of 82 which ap- 

 peared during the year 1901. Among those 

 omitted are some of first importance, while 

 even of the references given the entries under 

 special headings are incomplete and erroneous. 

 The reports on Porifera in the Zoological 

 Record and in the Archiv fur Naturgeschichte 

 appeai'ed in advance of the date given for the 

 completion of this manuscript, and yet the 

 latter is much less satisfactory. 



He might also have added that the insuffi- 

 ciency of the work on Porifera goes to show 

 governmental red tape in this enterprise and 

 lack of real control on the part of the scien- 

 tific staff, since, according to the title page, 

 the very man stands sponsor for this volume 

 who had already published one of the ad- 

 mirable bibliographies cited by Weltner as 

 worthy of emulation. 



Dr. T. Wayland Vaughan has published in 

 SciENCEf a comparison of the work on Coelen- 

 terata here with the cards of the Concilium 

 Bibliographicum, and the Zoological Record, 

 He found that " the Concilium Bibliograph- 

 icum procured 70 per cent, of the references, 

 the Zoological Record for 1901, 63 per cent., 

 and the ' International Catalogue ' 40 per 

 cent." " Works of importance published in 

 l)ractically every country are left out." 

 Promptness in appearance was in inverse 

 ratio to completeness. 



A further analysis of the subject catalogue 

 yielded interesting and important results for 

 its evaluation. Under the heading 0020 

 ' Periodicals, Reports of Institutions, Socie- 

 ties, Congresses, etc.,' are entered half a dozen 

 reports of individual journeys, excerpted from 

 publications of learned societies and certainly 

 not approi)riately classified in this subdivision, 

 while at the same time the leading zoological 

 journals are omitted. Furthermore, such 

 journals as are concerned with single groups 

 merely are entered here in some cases instead 

 of under the fitting special heading, e. g., 

 Pliiladclphia, Pa., S Indents' Entomological 



* Zool. Anzrigcr, .fiily 2(i, 11I04, Vol. 27, No. 2.5, 

 J.. 7S8. 



fN. S., Vol. XIX., No. 402, p. 800. 



Association, or International Congress of 

 Ornithology in Paris, 1900. In fact, the tech- 

 nical periodicals seem also to have fared ill in 

 this catalogue for the leading ornithological 

 and entomological journals do not appear in 

 anj' of the lists. 



Such inappropriate entries also occur among 

 individual publications, e. g., the Sequence 

 of Plumages & Moults entered under general 

 treatises, the Reproduction of the Protozoa, 

 and Entomological Field-work cited under ad- 

 dresses. Open to even more serious criticism 

 are such entries as a Collective Investigation 

 of Indian Culicidce and Studies on Eocene 

 Mammalia under 0060 ' Collections.' Under 

 the same numeral the subheading ' Economics ' 

 is also inconsistently and very incompletely 

 treated; but this is, no doubt, a difficult topic 

 to limit precisely. The same can not be said, 

 however, of 0070 ' Nomenclature (Principles 

 of)' in which important references are lack- 

 ing, while 0090 ' Technique ' has a total of 

 only 14 titles, some of which belong under 

 microscopy or biology, whereas the real list 

 of appropriate references under this heading 

 can not be reduced to less than fifty or 

 seventy-five titles, and the Concilium Biblio- 

 graphicum gives 110 cards with the date 1901. 

 It should also be noted that the titles given 

 in the ' International Catalogue ' have no 

 claim at all to preeminent importance, for 

 trivial items are included and weighty papers 

 omitted. The analysis might be pursued with 

 similar results through the other headings of 

 the catalogue. It is evident that the work has 

 not been done by persons at all familiar with 

 the subject matter. This feature is strik- 

 ingly shown in the omission of a paper on 

 certain insects entitled, ' Encore quelques mots 

 sur I'elevage des Bacilles,' although two other 

 liapcrs by the same author and in the same 

 journal are duly cited. One can not help 

 wondering whether the missing paper will 

 turn up under botany or bacteriology ! 



In order to test the accuracy and complete- 

 ness of the subject references for technical 

 purposes, I chose as a topic the fauna of New 

 Guinea and took for comparison the cards of 

 the Concilium Bibliographicum imder the 

 same heading. There were 36 of these cards 



