PEOCEEDIKGS OF THE THIRD ENTOMOLOGICAL MEETING U 



in which it appears. Separata pubUcations (for example, books ; althou»h 

 nothing should be considered as a book unless it contains a minimum 

 number of pages) cannot easily be legislated for but there seems to be 

 no end to the various serial publications in which entomological work 

 appears now-a-days. Some time ago the Imperial Bureau of Entomology 

 gave an incomplete census of present-day periodicals in wliich entomo- 

 logical articles are pubhshed, and this list, so far as I remember, came to 

 over- seventeen hundred. It is absolutely impossible to see all these, 

 even in the best libraries anywhere, and even a useful abstract hke the 

 "Zoological Record" is not really complete. Many important papers 

 are published in Transactions of Societies, etc., which to the entomoloo-ical 

 world contain little else of importance and no private worker and few 

 public libraries can take in complete sets of such Transactions merely 

 for the sake of an occasional paper which otherwise is overlooked or not 

 accessible when required for reference. To take the case of India only, 

 we have entomological papers appearing in the Memoirs, Bulletins and 

 Annual Eeports of the Agricultural and Forest Departments, the Memoirs 

 and Records of th^ Indian Museum, the Asiatic Society's Journal, the 

 Bombay Natural History Society's Journal, the Indian Journal of Medical 

 Research, the Journal of the Indian Tea Association, the Planters' Chro- 

 nicle, Spoha Zeylanica, and half a hundred other Bulletins, Reports, 

 Annuals and what-not issued by various GTOvernment Departments, 

 Native States and others, although hardly one of these pubUcations 

 is devoted entirely to Entomology. I have dealt with this in my pro- 

 posals for expansion and centralization of entomological work in India 

 and only wish to draw your attention now to the large mass of current 

 literature already in existence in India. But India is a comparatively 

 small contributor to entomological literature and we require a world- 

 wide scheme to centralize work as much as possible. 



My idea, roughly, is this, that the leading entomological (or zoological) 

 societies or workers in every civihzed country should consider the hterary 

 output of their own country and compile a hmited list of pubhcations 

 which would be considered official from the point of view of scientific 

 worth. For example, in England a dozen to twenty (at the outside) 

 publications — such as the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal, 

 Linnean, Zoological, and Entomological Societies, the Entomologist, the 

 Entomologists' Monthly Magazine, the Entomologists' Record and a few 

 other leading publications in pure and applied entomology, including a 

 few provincial publications — should suffice for all scientific work. If 

 anyone wished to pubhsh in non-official publications they could do so, 

 and their papers would of course be on record but would possess no 

 .scientific value. The effect of this would be that the amateur and casual 



