It evidently amazes our English cotemporary that a journal like the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, which, according to its own notions, is chiefly the work of "scissors and paste," should circulate so widely; and it even belittles our weekly circulation by several thousand copies, in order to give point to its very amusing, and, we will also add, generally just criticism.
The writer in _Engineering_, whoever he may be, appears to be a sort of literary Rip Van Winkle, just waking out of a long sleep; and he cannot get the idea through his head that it is possible that a technical journal can become a vehicle of popular information to the mass of mankind, instead of being the organ of a small clique of professional engineers or wealthy manufacturers, such as seems to hold control of the columns of _Engineering_, and who use it either to ventilate their own pet schemes and theories, or to advertise, by illustration and otherwise, in the reading columns, a repetition of lathes, axle-boxes brakes, cars, and other trade specialities, which can lay little or no claim to novelty. It is, furthermore, a crying sin in the estimation of our English critic that American technical journals do not separate their advertisements from the subject matter; and he thinks that when Yankee editors learn that trade announcements are out of place in the body of a journal, they will see how to make their journals pay by making them higher priced. Now we venture to say, without intending to give offence, that Yankee editors understand their business quite as well as do English editors; and it is presumable, at least, that they know what suits their readers on this side, much better than do English editors. We venture to suggest--modestly, of course--that journalism in the two countries is not the same, and should the editor of _Engineering_ undertake to transfer his system of intellectual labor to this side of the Atlantic, he would not be long in making the discovery that those wandering Bohemian engineers, who, he tells us, are in sorrow and heaviness over the short-comings of American technical journals, would turn out after all to be slender props for him to lean upon. We think it probable, however, that with a little more snap, a journal like _Engineering_ might possibly attain a circulation, in this country, of 500 or 1000 copies weekly.