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PREFACE. 



This Index of the first forty volumes of the '• Transactions and Proceedings 

 of tlie New Zealand Institute " has been compiled, in accordance with a 

 resolution of the Board of Governors, by Mr. Riddick. of the Government 

 Printing Office. An index of the first eight volumes was issued in 1877, 

 and one to the first seventeen volumes in 1886. Both of these are super- 

 seded by the present Index. This Index, however, deals only with the 

 authors and titles of the various papers, and no attempt has been made to 

 index the subject-matter of the articles themselves. The first part, the 

 index of the authors, presented no difficulty. In the second part, dealing 

 with the subject-matter of the titles to the different articles, the question 

 of classification was an extremely difficult one, and the system adopted can 

 onlv be looked upon as a compromise. In some subjects, such as Botany 

 and Geology, further subdivision would no doubt have been desirable, but 

 it was found that this was almost impossible, owing to the fact that many of 

 the papers are of a general nature, and deal with several branches of the 

 subject. The subdivisions under Zoology do not pretend to represent the 

 present scientific opinion on the subject, but are those which seemed most 

 practically useful in classifying a number of miscellaneous zoological articles 

 written between the years 1867 and 1907, and for the same reason it has 

 been kept as nearly as possible parallel with the classification adopted in 

 the " Index Fauna> Novse Zealandiic/' 



In the Proceedings of the different branches of the New Zealand Institute, 

 only those papers have been indexed of which some abstract has been given ; 

 papers of which only the title is given and which do not appear in the 

 Transactions are not indexed. 



