ii2 The Scottish Naturalist. 



To Institutions and Societies publishing Proceedings, Transactions, Memoirs, 

 &c, the Agency is proving of great benefit, and authors having extra copies of 

 their own papers for sale are finding it to their advantage, in thus making their 

 papers more widely known." 



Now, the above are only some of the advantages which would 

 flow from the establishment of an Agency in this country such 

 as I have attempted to indicate. The very presence of such 

 an Agency would create a demand for scientific knowledge. 

 Many small country reading-clubs, many libraries, and many 

 naturalists residing at a distance from the centres of scientific 

 circles would, I believe, hail the advent of such an Agency with 

 pleasure. They would then be enabled to purchase good scien- 

 tific literature at a low price. By means of the American 

 Naturalist's Agency, I for one have ?iever failed in procuring 

 easily any paper read at any meeting of any learned society in 

 the United States that I have applied for ;' but in this country 

 (mark the contrast) I have never succeeded in doing so, without 

 purchasing either a whole volume or a whole number of a 

 volume of the Proceedings, except in such cases as I have 

 received separately printed copies from the authors. Surely 

 science might be advanced by a more general distribution of 

 scientific papers. Again, many appendices to works on Travel 

 are thus lost to the general naturalist public, and notably I 

 may instance the appendices to the earlier Arctic and Antarctic 

 ■ " Voyages." An agency could reprint and repage these ap- 

 pendices, and, I believe, find a sale for them both in this 

 country and in America. 



An American correspondent of mine has repeatedly expressed 

 surprise that no such agency exists in Great Britain, and I have 

 often experienced great difficulty in obtaining pamphlets here 

 which my American correspondent wished to procure. I am 

 sure many others must have felt the same difficulty. 



Again, to show the enormous circulation and sale of pam- 

 phlets, &c, in the United States, I cannot do better than quote 

 in part the Annual Report of the Librarian of the Academy of 

 Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. He tells us that in 1S61 the 

 number of donations to the library was i6Sr. Of these there 

 were 380 volumes, 1295 pamphlets, and 6 maps ; so many were 

 folios, so many quartos, &c, &c. Of these, editors presented 

 r 5 7 ; authors, 209,; societies, 629; and one private indivi- 



