EVOLUTION OF SCIENTIFIC SERIALS. 
235 
and he demands with ever increasing emphasis that the re¬ 
sponsibility for every published statement shall be definitely 
fixed. The vehemence of this last demand is not felt by those 
authors who delude themselves with the notion that the 
publication of their names is a device for securing credit 
rather than fixing responsibility. But printed statements 
are worthless to the student unless vouched for by some 
individual in person; a thousand anonymous declarations 
that a meteor has fallen are disproved to the student by the 
simple utterance of a single reputable individual who backs 
his utterance with his name; and even the lay reader is 
coming to regard the author’s name as the sign manual of 
veracity. That the function of the author’s name was prop¬ 
erly appreciated by students even in the early days of 
scientific societies is proved by the formula—“ The society is 
not responsible for the facts and opinions expressed by its 
members ”—which has come down from the older organiza¬ 
tions just as functionless, vestigean organs are inherited from 
older organisms. 
Second in order of importance are the requirements of the 
bibliographer: It is he who classifies and catalogues books, 
not as loosely related units but as sources of information, 
and so renders their contents accessible to the student for 
whose use they are designed. At present the place of the 
bibliographer in the bibliothecal machinery is scarcely 
recognized, because, while his function is born of books, it 
is not felt until they become too numerous to be read and 
remembered; but the work of the bibliographer is repre¬ 
sented in subject catalogues, in book lists of all kinds, in 
annual records of progress in science, in the bibliographic 
references which careful authors and editors introduce as 
footnotes, and in the notices and reviews which have occu¬ 
pied a prominent place in scientific literature for years, as 
well as in the systematic bibliographies of various branches 
of knowledge which have been published in recent times ; 
and the function of the bibliographer is destined to increase 
in importance with the increase in volume of the literature 
