Francis Galton was one of those Victorian polymaths - gifted amateurs in scientific and technical fields - who were such a feature of the times. Members of learned societies, they were wealthy, leisured, intensely curious about the world surrounding them and of natural phenomena of all kinds. They followed their own bent and were virtually independent of laboratories; they dominated the learned world which was centred in London in the reseach organizations of which The Royal Society was the chief. Galton designed the weather maps which were first printed in The Times on April 1st, 1875; he established the importance of fingerprints as a means of identification; he participated enthusiastically in the affairs of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (he saw their yearly meetings as the modern equivalent of the Canterbury Pilgrims).

InfoTrac is an online periodicals index developed and marketed by the Information Access Company (IAC), of Belmont, California. It is very “user friendly” by design, and can provide for readers printouts of citations in a matter of a few seconds without the assistance of a librarian. The InfoTrac database itself consists primarily of citations from nearly 1000 journals which are also indexed by IAC its Business Index, Magazine Index, and Legal Resources Index retrospective to 1982. In addition material from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as indexed in its National Newspaper Index for the previous two months will be found in InfoTrac. The data base is cumulated and updated monthly. In all accounts, both verbal and written, InfoTrac is enormously popular with readers. Much of this popularity, however, seems to focus on the technology of InfoTrac obscuring some important issues not the least of which are the accessibility of the journals indexed and the reliability and relevance of the information to which an unassisted reader is quickly lead.

The postcard is one of the latest arrivals among the “collectables”. The urge to collect postage stamps has a longer history, because adhesives arrived so much earlier. The postal historian looks back even futher in time. But the postcard was not born until 1 October, 1869, and the picture postcard did not appear until the 1870s.

There was a world-wide craze for collecting postcards which began at the turn of the century and persisted until 1918. Then it came to an abrupt end, partly because of the doubling of postage on cards (from ½d to 1d for inland mail) and partly because the more general use of the telephone superseded the postcard as a medium for brief messages.

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in collecting picture postcards. However the emphasis has moved away from contemporary issues (though many enthusiasts do concentrate on the “moderns”).