The abstract, under a multitude of names, such as hypothesis, marginalia, abridgement, extract, digest, précis, resumé, and summary, has a long history, one which is concomitant with advancing scholarship. The progression of this history from the Sumerian civilization ca. 3600 B.C., through the Egyptian and Greek civilizations, the Hellenistic period, the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and into the modern period is reviewed.

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The language barrier is yielding to translations of parts or complete journals and to listings and indexing of translations available for distribution.The outstanding, most used, and broadest of all literature services for the food industry is Chemical Abstracts Service. They process about 12,000 serial publications. Information is condensed and integrated into a large inventory of chemical knowledge. This unit is used in toto; and the system has the capability of mechanically separating units on polymers, biochemistry, foods, or a single chemical, food, or beverage. Although this contains the biggest inventory of knowledge on food, there are separate plans in the development stage to serve the food industry's needs in all their ramifications. This could include information of farm and food industry mechanical developments, marketing, packaging, food laws, etc. There are also activities toward integrating all information.To conclude briefly, may it be said that the types of literature required by the food industry scientist and technologist are dispersed among the writings of many different peoples and disciplines. It is hoped the small number of samples mentioned here indicates this situation.

Although there are relatively few toxophoric groups of importance in the literature of pesticides, the number of individual compounds in each toxophoric class is large. For example, there are more than 2000 U. S. patents describing many thousands of organic phosphorus compounds as pesticides. The January-June, 1962, Chemical Abstracts Subject Index required four pages (a total of 12 columns) to list the phosphorothioate and phosphorodithioate entries, most of which pertain to the preparation, composition, and uses of the compounds as pesticides.Other toxophoric groups, such as halogen, amide, urea, carbamate, etc., similarly have thousands of members which have been studied for their pesticidal activity.