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BIGELOW. 
garding certain definite subjects and be responsible for tables of 
constants, formulae, as well as nomenclature. The very growth, 
however, of knowledge makes the task set for the standard 
journals increasingly difficult, because the reference sum¬ 
maries are meager and there must necessarily be an immense 
and increasing number of them. The work of our congresses 
or international committees is also unsatisfactory, because the 
labor of bringing many men to the same point of view re¬ 
garding intricate questions is very great, and, indeed, so im¬ 
practicable that in fact only few advanced problems, and 
usually only simple questions, can be treated in this way. 
In my judgment, the best plan to pursue would be for ex¬ 
perts to train themselves thoroughly in special directions, so 
that they can study up, digest, and classify certain branches 
of knowledge once for all, and thus leave to their successors 
all the real information there is, expressed in short space and 
in language recognized as standard. If this generation has 
been prolific of a multitude of research men, the time may 
not be far distant when advanced work will be limited to 
the few who have developed special knowledge and pecu¬ 
liar instinct for such progress, and when, simultaneously, a 
number of students shall unify and simplify to the utmost 
the real residuum of facts and laws. For this latter purpose 
we need first of all a standard international system of nota¬ 
tion in mathematics and physics, by which it will become 
perfectly easy to pass from one man’s writing to another’s, 
so far as the use of coordinate axes, letters, and symbols to 
represent fixed quantities and relations are concerned. I 
have taken the trouble, indeed it has been a necessity for 
me to do so, to rearrange the symbols in my texts on meteor¬ 
ology and terrestrial magnetism in a uniform notation, to 
the great assistance of scholarship and pleasure in studying 
these subjects; for there is nothing more annoying than to 
acquire the ideas of one author in certain equations, and then 
on passing to another author who has written on parallel 
lines to find the same ideas and facts expressed in terms just 
enough different to make every equation and combination 
