THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES 



full discussion, such as may well arise in a specialised 

 Society, is not often possible. 



In the case of the Royal Society, this absence of op- 

 portunity for discussion at ordinary meetings is to some 

 extent provided for by the Standing Order, that in each 

 year as many as four meetings may be set apart for the 

 discussion of some important topic. In addition to this 

 provision for exceptional discussion, the Secretaries do 

 all that is in their power to have papers on the Mathematical 

 and Physical sciences, and those on Physiology and Natural 

 History, taken respectively at alternate meetings, but it 

 is obvious that such an arrangement cannot be strictly 

 carried out, because authors are always anxious that their 

 papers shall be read with as little delay as possible, and 

 therefore with as little interference as may be with the 

 order in which they have been received. Any plan that 

 might be suggested to differentiate the papers into special- 

 ised groups, so as to encourage a larger attendance of 

 specialists at the meetings when they would be read, would 

 be, in consequence of the longer delay in the publication of 

 new work, neither acceptable to the Fellows nor favourable 

 to the progress of science. Considering the highly special- 

 ised and necessarily detailed nature of the larger number 

 of the papers received by the Society, it is a question to 

 which more than one answer may be given, whether the 

 subject of a paper is much advanced by a discussion 

 founded on the abstract, which can alone be read at the 



meeting, and whether the time has not come when adequate 



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