Abstract
DR FELIX OSWALD (NATURE, vol. Ixxv. p. 197) performed a remarkable feat when he printed his “Treatise on the Geology of Armenia” on a hand-press at Beeston in 1905. Prof. Rudolf Spitaler has reverted further, and has issued his work on glacial climates in a written script. The reproduction of this by lithography secures a uniformity that was not always possible among the ancients. He thus shows us a way out of the apparent impasse that has threatened scientific publication. The lodging in suitable libraries of, say, a hundred copies of a quarto memoir such as this would go far in the dissemination of ideas, and the process lends itself to tabular matter, freely used by Prof. Spitaler, and also to much delicacy of illustration. Authors in the days of imperial Rome were not dissatisfied with a manuscript mode of publication. The monumental “Naturalis Historia” of the elder Pliny, in thirty-seven books, gained a handsome circulation, and the author was engaged on a supplement—how well we know those supplements !—in the tragic year of 79. The genial Martial directs a would-be borrower to the shop of Attractus opposite Caesar's forum, in the certainty that a copy of his latest poems could be bought there for five denarii. Allowing for the exchange, Prof. Spitaler asks little more, and we must remember that Roman publishers had the advantage of slave-labour.
Das Klima des Eiszeitalters.
By Prof. Dr. R. Spitaler. Pp. iv + 138. (Prag: from the author, Smichow, 379. 1921.) 65K.
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C., G. Das Klima des Eiszeitalters . Nature 109, 512 (1922). https://doi.org/10.1038/109512a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/109512a0