( Iviii ) 



several months in our hands, to form some estimate of what 

 is required of a Library that hopes to keep pace with the 

 hterature of the time. We find there that the number of 

 separate titles belonging to the Insecta alone reached in the 

 year 1891 the large total of 974, and the new generic names 

 proposed for insects in the same year 765, the latter being 

 considerably more than half the number of generic names 

 proposed in the whole of the zoological literature of the year. 

 And yet this large amount of literature does not nearly keep 

 pace with the flood of new material that reaches us from all 

 parts of the world ! That the Entomological Society's 

 Library should grow in proportion to the literature of the 

 subject to which we devote so much of our energy is what we 

 all wish, but a result we can hardly hope to attain. Neverthe- 

 less it is yearly of increasing importance that we should perform 

 a definite share in gathering within the metropolis as much 

 entomological literature as can be got together. Quite recently 

 the Council of the Royal Society decided, after much discus- 

 sion, that the Catalogue of Scientific Papers published under its 

 auspices should in future be compiled from such periodicals 

 only as are to be found in the libraries of the principal 

 scientific societies in London. If this resolution is strictly 

 adhered to, the societies in question should endeavour to see 

 that no periodical of any importance should be omitted from 

 one or other of their libraries, so as to render the Catalogue 

 of Papers as complete as possible. This leads to the sugges- 

 tion that some arrangement might be advantageously made 

 between the societies themselves, so that each might take a 

 share of maintaining certain periodicals, and that their 

 money and space should not, as is often the case at present, 

 be devoted to the acquisition of sets of the same periodical. A 

 mutual arrangement of this kind would involve some kind of 

 association between certain societies, so as to render their re- 

 spective libraries accessible to their Fellows in common, and a 

 plan to meet this might easily be devised. We have only to look 

 at the books on our own shelves, to form a small estimate of the 

 growth that has taken place in periodical literature during the 

 last twenty-five years, and then look forward to what dimen- 

 sions it will attain in another quarter of a century, to see that 



