This number marks an important event in the history of this journal. Sir James Gray, who as senior editor has directed editorial policy almost since its foundation, has asked to be allowed to lay down his burden. In his place the Company of Biologists have appointed Professor V. B. Wigglesworth. Their choice will be applauded by biologists generally. Moreover, he will continue to have the able help of Dr J. A. Ramsay, and the change of editorship carries with it no change in general editorial policy.
Readers and contributors will wish the new editor all success. He inherits a journal which in the course of some thirty years has come to hold a very high place amongst the World’s scientific publications. In reaching that position it has materially influenced the science of biology during a period of very active growth. This is the work of the retiring editor.
The journal began just after the First World War. The previous decade had seen the end of that great phase of classificatory morphology which had dominated zoology, and to a less extent botany, during the latter half of the nineteenth century. As an inspiration for research it had, for the time, become sterile, particularly in zoology. The year 1918 was a time of breaking traditions. In natural science it put a period to a phase which began in the seventeenth century with the foundation of the Royal Society. The young zoologists and botanists of 1918 were not content with the old morphology. They turned their attention to the living organism, to the relation of structure to function, to the physico-chemical basis of living processes and to the relation of living things to their environment. In this they were joined by the physiologists who, largely under the powerful influence of Bayliss’s General Physiology had come to realize that their subject extended far beyond man and the familiar laboratory vertebrates. The common feature in the heterogeneous assembly of their researches was interest in the living organism and in the use of experiment as well as observation to reach conclusions.
In this way ‘experimental biology’ came into existence. In spite of occasional difficulties its original wide range is still maintained by the Society for Experimental Biology now nearing its hundredth meeting. Those engaged in such researches required a journal of new scope for their publications. Very bravely in October 1923 a group of biologists launched the first number of the British Journal of Experimental Biology with an editorial board under Professor F. A. E. Crewe as managing editor. But this new journal was almost at once surrounded with difficulties. It soon became apparent that the journal would receive its greatest support from the ‘animal’ side. Practical difficulties attendant upon any attempt to disregard the traditional divisions of biological organization proved to be rather more than a youthful idealism could surmount. The needs of the experimental zoologist and those of the experimental botanist were not in practice the same. Plant physiology and the study of the physical environment of plants has always been very properly included in botany. And though the experimental botanist had difficulties about publication—as the recently started Journal of Experimental Botany bears witness—it was at least possible for the plant physiologist to bring much of his work before the public he desired.
Similarly, it proved undesirable for the new journal to overlap too completely with others already existing, such as those catering for genetics and traditional physiology. Whether we like it or not, in the divisions of scientific publications there is a powerful historical element which cannot be disregarded. Just as the present divisions of the sciences themselves are profoundly influenced by the accident of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century benefactions to our universities and medical schools, so must the field of any new journal be influenced by the character, of journals already established. But the word ‘biology’ in our title reminds us of the grand idea that underlay the foundation of the journal. And if the ‘biology’ has in practice become essentially restricted to that of animals, it still reminds us that these are to be considered only as part of the whole array of living things. May no future pedant change our title.
Whilst the experimental botanists were not without their difficulties, those of the experimental zoologists were more serious. To-day we so naturally take for granted a broad view of the content of zoology that it is not easy to recapture the old atmosphere of dissension and bitterness about the scope of the science. With certain honourable exceptions the older generation of zoologists of the early twenties looked askance at the new venture. For many years ‘experimental biology ‘was treated by many as a bastard science outside the pale of pure evolutionary morphology whose boundaries—curiously—were considered to be coterminous with those of zoology itself. There was at first no journal to receive and welcome the work of the experimental zoologist.
But as might be expected, the primary difficulty of the British Journal of Experimental Biology was financial. The first number of the new journal announced the intention to form a ‘British Association of Experimental Biologists: to promote intercourse between experimental biologists within the United Kingdom and to encourage facilities for the publication of experimental work’. This was the embryo of the Society for Experimental Biology which came into existence in December 1923. From its first meeting the Society was a success. It had the enthusiasm of youth: nearly everyone concerned in these events was in the twenties or early thirties. In these more highly organized days, youth is not so well served with opportunity to mould things to its desire. But though young people are active and enthusiastic they are commonly penurious, and when a motion was put that the journal be financed by every member subscribing to it, the motion was rejected. And though the journal was acclaimed the official medium of publication of the Society, the problem of financing it was left unsolved.
Another difficulty that beset the British Journal of Experimental Biology was this : there already existed another journal in this new field. There was a small but active group of experimental zoologists at Cambridge. Gray, our retiring editor, had persuaded the Cambridge Philosophical Society to divide their Proceedings into Physical and Biological Sections. They appointed him editor of their Biological Proceedings and the very success of this venture cut off a not unimportant section of experimental zoologists from the British Journal of Experimental Biology. With all the uncertainties ahead there might be room for one journal, there was certainly none for two.
Something had to be done and in the negotiations which ensued a leading part was played by the late Dr G. P. Bidder whose wise advise and timely help have done so much for British biology during the last fifty years. A limited liability company, the Company of Biologists, was formed with the object of owning and publishing scientific journals. A number of biologists, the majority being members of the Society for Experimental Biology, were invited to become shareholders and with the capital thus raised the British Journal of Experimental Biology was taken over from the firm which was then publishing it. As time went on more shares were bought, a number by the Society for Experimental Biology itself, and in this way the journal was given support in its early years. Needless to say the shareholders did not expect or receive any dividend but their subscriptions have recently been repaid and the Company has reformed as a company limited by guarantee, without share capital, a form of association which has enabled it to become recognised as a charity.
The creation of the Company introduced an important new principle : the separation of the financial from the editorial side of publication. By its articles the Board of the Company cannot interfere with the policy of its editors. One of its earliest acts brought in another principle of equal importance. The original British Journal of Experimental Biology was edited by a Board. In well-defined branches of science with well-established standards, this method of editing has sometimes worked well. But the new journal was faced with problems of every kind including the setting of a high and consistent standard in new parts of biology. For such a journal that latter-day nautical curiosity, the ‘steering committee’, was a wholly unsuitable substitute for an editor; provided an editor with really wide knowledge and with sagacity could be found. After a few rapid intermediate arrangements, the Board appointed Gray as editor of the journal, the journal was transferred to its present printers, the Cambridge University Press, and its title was changed to its present one by the omission of the word ‘British’.
With Gray’s appointment to the British Journal of Experimental Biology he ceased to edit the Biological Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. This was transformed into a journal of a different sort, the now well-known Biological Reviews.
Since 1926 publishing of all kinds has gone through many vicissitudes. But from the smallest of beginnings the retiring editor has brought the Journal of Experimental Biology to a state in which it is recognized as one of the leading biological journals, a journal which combines its wide field of interest with a high and consistent standard. That is a lasting gain. For the state of Natural Science in any age is more surely reflected in the quality of its scientific publications than in the magnificence of its institutions and the expense of its equipment.
