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social than scientific. The French Society was very quickly 

 followed by our own Society in 1833, which by some curious 

 fatality called itself The Entomological Society of London — 

 why not of Great Britain, or Britain, or even England 1 

 From these the number of Entomological Societies increased 

 and multiplied wonderfully, until the danger now is the other 

 way, inasmuch as it is almost impossible to keep abreast with 

 the enormous amount of literature which is now published. 

 This is one of the disadvantages of the present end of the 

 century as against the beginning, as I find that the number 

 of Natural History Transactions, Proceedings, Bulletins, and 

 Magazines amounted to nearly 950, as noted in the Zoological 

 Record for 1898. Our grandparents had diflficulty in obtain- 

 ing descriptive material published in other countries, but 

 there was but little to obtain, and we know that they com- 

 monly did exchange their publications, and the point I wish 

 to urge is that those publications were well-thought-out publi- 

 cations, over which the author had probably spent many years 

 before issuing them to the world. We now have such a 

 considerable number of Societies with their Transactions and 

 Proceedings, besides innumerable Magazines devoted wholly or 

 partly to Entomology, that it is impossible for anybody to be 

 quite level with the literature of the day, and this leads me to 

 the statement that there is growing on the one side a tendency 

 to issue loose crude descriptions of so-called new species by 

 students who have worked at an order for a few months, 

 because of the facilities given for such publications ; on the 

 other side the old authors waited and thought out their whole 

 volume, while the new age dashes into print in the next 

 monthly magazine. I wish we could go back more to the 

 ponderous tomes which represented years of well-digested 

 work. The loose crude descriptions tend to choke the flow of 

 knowledge, because the tangle of synonymy becomes so over- 

 whelming that nothing but the arrival of the monographer 

 can cut the "sudd." 



Just however as diflSculties increase so do methods of 

 coping with those difliculties increase, and the establishment 

 of Gersttecker's Bericht, and our own Zoological Record, 

 should prevent any careful student from being much behind 



