EVOLUTION OF SCIENTIFIC SERIALS. 
233 
the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 
and the Proceedings of the American Association for the Ad¬ 
vancement of Science), by which they have, contrary not only 
to the expectation but even to the express plans and purposes 
of their founders, become changed from almost purely ad¬ 
ministrative to predominantly scientific records. The purely 
administrative serial has never held its own for any consid¬ 
erable period, save in the National Academy of Sciences, 
where the conditions are unique, and in the American 
Society of Civil Engineers, where the serial is weak and 
tottering if not decadent; and in the joint records the tend¬ 
ency is decidedly in the direction of condensation of the ad¬ 
ministrative matter. 
Summing these several tendencies, it appears that the 
general drift of serial publication by scientific societies is 
toward a combined record of research and administration 
(the latter condensed) in the form of a single 8vo serial, 
printed promptly in small parts and issued at intervals 
depending on the accumulation of matter. 
No one can scan the serials issued by any considerable 
number of scientific societies without perceiving that, what¬ 
ever form and character their founders may impose upon 
them, they are subject to laws of development more potent 
than the efforts of editors, publishing committees, or even 
wealthy and well-organized societies, by which their ulti¬ 
mate success or failure and the qualities which tend toward 
these ends are determined. Neither can the student fail to 
perceive that the younger organizations have (perhaps un¬ 
consciously) profited by the experience of their elders, and 
that the modern serials, whether the direct outgrowth of the 
ancient series of mighty tomes or the offspring of new 
organizations modelled in part after the old, are the more 
stable. In short, the serial, like the organism and the insti¬ 
tution generally, is a creature of environment, and, whatever 
its birthright, quickly passes into the troubled sea of mortal 
strife in which only those survive who both conquer their 
