50 Years Ago

The question of how far an editor should go in correcting an author's manuscript was discussed on April 29 at a meeting of the Scientific Publications Council ... Dr. R. D. Keynes ... said an editor has a dual responsibility (a) to the author and (b) to the reader. Many authors submit manuscripts containing a long historical introduction and a discussion that is a wearisome repetition of the results ... However, conformity to a standard form of presentation should not be insisted on too rigidly, and in matters of taste the author should always have the last word ... Some editors send the author a report from an anonymous referee, but anonymity is apt to cause resentment; an editor writing personally can often be much ruder and more effective without causing ill-feeling.

From Nature 9 July 1960.

100 Years Ago

The Laws of Heredity. By G. Archdall Reid — Dr. Archdall Reid confesses that he is an “extreme Darwinian” ... The author accepts and starts from Weismann's theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm. From this he makes the fundamental deduction that “individuals ... are nothing more than dwellings which the germ-plasm builds about its germinal descendants.” Thence it follows “that the child inherits nothing from his parent.” What it does inherit is nothing more than what was “inborn” in the germ-plasm from which it started. The germ-plasm ... produces the enveloping soma. But the latter also requires the stimulus of use ... a limb will not reach full development unless used, and mental powers will remain dormant unless exercised. But the characters so developed are “rooted, as it were, in the germ-plasm.” They flow from it: the question ... is whether modification of these characters produced by the stimulus of use can flow back and be transmitted to a succeeding generation. Darwin latterly apparently thought they could.

From Nature 7 July 1910.