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THE New English dictionary on historical principles founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society, edited by James A H Murray, forty‐four years in the making, and now known the world over as the Oxford English dictionary holds an unchallenged place in that remarkable series of substantial works of learning and scholarship planned, nurtured, and executed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Rolls series, the Dictionary of national biography, and at the turn of the century, the Cambridge moderm history and the Victorian history of the counties of England, all bear witness to the tremendous, almost incredible, energy of the Victorian middle classes who, sometimes holding academic posts at the universities, or perhaps earning their bread as publishers (regarded then as one of the very few commercial pursuits allowed to gentlemen), formed clubs and learned societies to occupy their ‘leisure’ hours, and conceived and brought to fruition their costly schemes for ambitious publishing programmes, refusing to be deterred by years of unremitting toil which consumed their time, their money, but never sapped their vision or their dedication.

After relatively a short period of neglect, cybernetics has been recognized in the former USSR and attracted a broad range of scientists. A brief review of some cybernetical researches in the former USSR and in modern Russia is presented. On the basis of Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener’s concept of homeostasis, a special approach to studying systems of various kinds has been formed in the last ten years. A brief picture of the main features of this approach, called “Homeostatics” and its results during the last five years, is displayed. In the line of Stafford Beer the foremost attention is paid to social systems and organizations, their control and survivability. A few other important cybernetical directions in the Russian science, such as artificial intelligence and informatization, are described.