Matskási István (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 100. (Budapest 2008)

Matskási, I. ; Vásárhelyi, T.: Celebrating the 100th volume of the Hungarian Natural History Museum’s yearbook

scientific processing of zoological, botanical, mineral, and paleontological items stored by the Hungarian National Museum s Natural History Departments and spread the scientific information thereof" Not even the language of the Journal could remain immune to changes. By this time the number of proceedings written in Hungarian was very low. The tempests of history, however, had their impact on this scientific organ, too. The continuous and even flow of publishing would from to time get disrupted, as it is well proven by the fact that the 100 volumes came out in 105 years. Strangely enough it is not the world war years to blame for the disruption of the continuity of publishing. Even 1945 and 1946 saw a - true, rather thin - volume come out each year. In the 1920s and 30s, i.e. the seemingly undisturbed "years of peace", several volumes' articles got bundled in separate tomes. Besides appearing as separate plates, the illustrations would also appear as inserted in between paragraphs in 1903. Coloured figures, however, disappeared in 1928 only to return in 1999 with the emergence of advanced typographic technology. This was the period when articles on chemical or physical subjects started coming out, and then after 1945 - when the anthropological collection of the museum was established - several anthropological proceedings appeared. In 1951 the volume of the Annales came out as "Series Nova 1". "Series Nova" counted 9 volumes, and it was in I960 when continuous numbering - which goes back to 1903 - became re-instituted. The journal saw several changes in 1991, 1994 and 2000, as a result of which the covers and the sheets in between took on the present modern look. In the past few decades a single volume of the Museum's Annales has come out each year in a more or less consistent size of 250-400 pages. While earlier the journal used to accept proceedings in both German and French, English has literally squeezed out every other language in the past few decades. The journal today contains two standard columns: The Museum staff s list of publications and the research fellows' name list that helps our readers keep track of the consistently great achievements of Hungary's most significant natural history institution. The Annales is regarded as the most important publication of the Natural History Museum even today. It gives an account of the achievements of the Museum's five key fields of scientific research: mineralogy and petrology, palaeontology, zoology, botany, and anthropology. Although the