THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

however, he was as mighty as a crusader wielding sword and
buckler amid swarming infidels. With a penetration which
derived from, as it was heightened by, a procedure of infinite
comparison, his task was laboriously, comprehensively, to analyse,
criticise, interpret, describe and annotate the works falling
within the consciously limited purview of his attention.
To his disciplines and his sense of fitting limitation the Belgians
had not chpsen to submit and so, callow and pjetentious,
stood doubly, damned.
FRENCH SCIENTISTS
It was not so with the scientists of France, who, like their
confreres elsewhere in Europe and America, had become increasingly
aware of the problems presented by their rapidly proliferating
literature. The publication during the last half of
the century of the Royal Society's Catalogue, of Scientific Papers
slow though it was, represented a responce to a widely
experienced need. The recognition that this catalogue was no
longer adequate, the demand that it be expanded, and the realisation
that it could be made full enough to be useful only by
international co-operation, was an example of a much more
general phenomenon. The International Institute of Statistics
as early as 1887, and the International Colonial Institute set
up in Brussels in 1894, had addressed themselves to organising
bibliographical services. 23 The International Congress on the
Bibliography of the Mathematical Sciences in 1889 had attempted
to do for the literature of mathematics, what the Royal
Society proposed in 1894 for the literature of the natural sciences
as a whole. An International Congress of Applied Chemistry
had set up an International Bureau of Chemical Literature in
Brussels in 1894, 24 and an International Congress of Zoology
had established the Concilium Bibliographicum in Zurich in
1895. 25 The American Association for the Advancement of
Science was actively attempting to create for Botany a
bibliographical bureau similar to the Concilium Bibliographicum,
and the bibliography of geography was an important preoccupation
of the International Congresses of the Geographical
Sciences. 26
When the Association franchise pour l'avancement des
sciences began to ponder the problems of bibliography, its
first deliberations were directed towards the difficulties encountered
in formulating titles for scientific papers which would
be specific, concrete and accurate. A Committee of the Association
presented a report on the matter to the Association's
meeting in Bordeaux in August 1895. Its recommendations
agreed substantially with a more detailed proposal for uniform
citations of scientific papers prepared by a Committee of the
63