As chief editor not only of the three present parts but also of the whole series of our scientific works Dr GÖSTA MONTELL has functioned with great skill and care ever since its commencement in the year 1936. No-one who has not himself had to do with the publication of a big scientific series can have any idea of the patience, the industry and the experience of the technical details of editing that such a post demands. Daily conversations and meetings with the various authors, with the government, the Academy of Science, the publishers and all the institutes that produce maps and illustrations, as well as a thousand and one other cares, take up the best part of the chief editor's time. I cannot easily express my gratitude to GÖSTA MONTELL for the splendid way in which he has performed his responsible and exacting task.
A board appointed by the Royal Academy of Science and whose chairman is Professor HENNING PLEIJEL, the secretary of the Academy, constitutes, in the work of publication and in the application of the state grant, a support for us at the same time as it forms a connecting link between the government and the expedition.
For the photographs to the plates I am indebted to several members of the expedition. Among the innumerable photographs that were taken during our years in Asia BERGMAN and MONTELL have made, as I think, a splendidly representative selection. The drawings included with the text are reproductions of the pencil sketches I made in the field, just as they were, and without any subsequent improvements. Certain of the drawings in part III have been filled, in with Chinese ink.
The survey-map appended to part III, showing all the routes taken by the expedition, was drawn under the supervision of Dr ERIK NORIN. The detailed map-material collected by the members of the expedition has been done justice in the big »Hedin Zentralasien-Atlas » that to a scale of I: 1,000,000 and in 54 sheets is in course of publication at JusTus PERTHES in Gotha. On the initiative of the German Government the costs for this atlas are being met by the Forschungsgemeinscha f t der Deutschen Wissenscha f t, a piece of generosity for which I beg to express my warm thanks.
I wish to express my warm sense of gratitude to my sisters, especially my sister ALMA, who, on the Stockholm front, for the whole duration of the expedition looked after our interests, managed our finances, procured and sent out to us instruments and all sorts of items for our equipment, as well as handling the enormous correspondence that grew up between the widely ramifying groups of the expedition and Stockholm. All this work behind the scenes often meant a very considerable nervous strain, especially during those periods when the economic position of the expedition was uncertain and seemed, as indeed it sometimes did, hopeless. During the whole of my absence Stockholm was so to speak a second headquarters, without which the expedition could scarcely have functioned.
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