Excerpt from Hardwicke's Science-Gossip, 1881, Vol. 17: An Illustrated Medium of Interchange and Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature The most difficult, and yet somehow the most necessary thing the Editor of a magazine has to do, is to indite a Preface to his yearly volume. He appears year after year before nearly the same audience, to say the same things, and to endeavour to say them in a different way, all the time feeling that the audience is taking a critical note as to whether the act is well done or not! But this annual custom is not without its advantages. It enables the Editor to issue a personal Encyclical. Letter to all those with whom he has been brought into contact during the past twelve months, _directly or indirectly. There. Are hundreds of correspondents whose faces he has never seen, and perhaps never will see, with whose hand-writing he is as familiar as if he had known them in the flesh since childhood! From all of these he is in the habit of receiving favours. They communicate to him the results of their reading and investigation; or they generously come forward to help young students and observers with their own richer and fuller knowledge and experience. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.