OF WASHINGTON. 13 



entious labor have never been published, because no pub 

 lisher could be found for them. 



By far the largest portion of contributions to natural history, 

 including entomology, has not been published in the form of 

 separate books, but in the Transactions or Proceedings of 

 societies, or in whatever form the periodical literature has 

 assumed. This class of literature originated at a very early 

 period, and nourished in America long before there were any 

 entomologists here. The enormous and still increasing extent 

 of periodical literature is one of the most characteristic features 

 of modern science : in the Zoological Record for 1887 I 

 counted the number of Journals and Transactions of learned 

 societies which for that year contain zoological papers, and 

 found the number to be. not less than seven hundred and fifty; 

 and if we deduct therefrom those which restrict themselves to 

 limited branches, as the ichthyological, ornithological and 

 similar journals, and which are, therefore, not likely to contain 

 entomological papers, there remain about six hundred and 

 fifty scientific periodicals appearing in one year, and which 

 contain or may contain contributions to entomological science. 

 Where would be our science without authors' extras ? Of this 

 number there are credited to North America eighty-five, but 

 this does not include a single one of the Transactions and 

 Proceedings of our numerous Agricultural and Horticultural 

 Societies, which no doubt are legitimate channels for the pub 

 lication of a certain class of entomological contributions. 

 Moreover the editors of the Record, for 1887, have overlooked 

 quite a number of American scientific periodicals, and if we 

 add the number of those periodicals which have started since 

 1887, and those which have flourished at the beginning of this 

 century, or later, and have now become extinct, the number of 

 American serials is swelled to about one hundred and fifty. 

 When, a hundred years ago, entomological science began to be 

 cultivated here, the earlier authors found of course only a limited 

 number of such periodicals at their disposal, but few as they 

 were, they fully sufficed to accommodate all entomological arti 

 cles. The trouble is that these early periodicals were issued 

 in excessively small editions, and since there w r ere no authors' 



