Abstract
WE congratulate our twin brother (or sister?) the Academy, on the appearance of its first volume. The journal had at its starting a clear raison d'être, to respond “to a widely felt and constantly expressed dissatisfaction with the existing organs of literary and scientific criticism.” The wide field embraced in the programme has rendered the editor's task anything but an easy one. Of the literary department it does not come within our province to speak; the scientific portion, we can fairly say, has been honestly and ably executed. This department consists of two sections—original reviews, and scientific notes. The former, in accordance with the practice of the rest of the paper, are all signed. The desirability of signed articles is one that has been much debated. Whatever may be its relative advantages or disadvantages in literature or politics, we are convinced that in science the former greatly outweigh the latter. In reading a criticism on a scientific work, it is before all things necessary that we should know that the critic has a right, from his own knowledge of the subject, to speak with authority. The signatures to the scientific articles which will be found in this volume are themselves sufficient guarantee that the subject is discussed from a standpoint from which something is to be gained by the reader. The scientific notes consist of paragraphs under the various heads of chemistry, physics, geology, zoology, botany, physiology, &c., epitomising the most important discoveries or researches of the month. Though the subjects are rather unequally treated, the notes have evidently been drawn up with great care by competent men, and the whole gives a very fair résumé of the more important advances in each department of science. If we might mention one section that appears to us to have been particularly well done, it is that of physiology. A list of the new books of the month, English and foreign, is also given, and the titles of the more important scientific magazine articles, with occasional abstracts of them. We notice with pleasure the conscientious manner in which the editor invariably acknowledges the source of his information, a practice we could wish to see more generally carried out by his brothers of the craft. Other literary journals have been content hitherto to supply their readers with their modicum of science either second-hand and very much out of date, or with a disregard to accuracy which has rendered it perfectly valueless. The Academy is doing good service in bringing scientific subjects before educated readers who have no special scientific bias, in a style that is likely to interest them in it, and in a manner that may be relied on as sound and accurate, and calculated to increase the knowledge in which they are, as a rule, so lamentably deficient.
The Academy.
Vol. 1. (London: Williams and Norgate. 1870.)
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The Academy . Nature 3, 164 (1870). https://doi.org/10.1038/003164a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/003164a0