Notes

Abstract

WE have received a communication from Dr. Rein, Director of the Lenckenberg Society of Naturalists at Frankfort, which amusingly illustrates the perils that accompany the honours of the translation into a foreign language of a scientific work. Our informant relates that the well-known publisher, M. R. Oppenheim, of Berlin, having recently obtained the sanction of Mr. Poulett Scrope for the publication of a German translation of his work on “Volcanoes,” of which a new issue lately appeared in this country, confided the work of translation to Prof. G. A. von Klöden, who accordingly performed the task. The translation was printed, together with a preface written by M. von Klöden himself—which preface, in the hurry of business, and in reliance, of course, on the good faith of the translator, the publisher forebore from examining. The volume in due course appeared, and was circulated by the publisher; and not till then was it discovered that the preface aforesaid consisted of a severe and indeed bitter critique of the work to which it was prefixed, and of the author's views as therein stated of the theory of volcanic energy, and its external development in the formation of cones and craters, &c. The explanation is that Prof, von Klöden happens—unluckily for the author whose work he undertook to translate—to have been all his life an earnest advocate and teacher of the famous “Erhebungs-Krater,” or “upheaval crater” theory of Humboldt and Von Buch, which Mr. Scrope, together with Sir C. Lyell, Constant Prevost, and other geologists have persistently opposed, and are, we believe, generally considered to have satisfactorily refuted. Of course it is open to Prof. von. Klöden to expound and defend his own opinion on this subject to the fullest extent in any independent publication; but it does seem to be stretching the liberty of free expression on scientific questions in an unprecedented manner, when a gentleman employed to translate a scientific work takes advantage of the opportunity to append to the translation, in the disguise of a preface, a pamphlet of nineteen pages containing an elaborate refutation, according to his own ideas, of the bulk of the views contained in the work itself. Mr. Scrope, we understand, on becoming aware of this strange conduct of Prof, von Klöden, has endeavoured to meet the attack thus unfairly made on his work, by circulating as widely as possible through the scientific world of Germany, a translation of his essay on the formation of volcanic cones and craters, originally read before the Geological Society of London in February 1859, and published in the journal of the Society for that year, a paper ia which the theory of “Erhebungs-Kratere” was amply discussed. But even here the author appears to have had but scant justice done to him, if it be true, as Dr. Rein assures us, that “the German of this translation is very bad!”