166 Record of the Royal Society. 



December the llth, 1834, and who have contributed a paper, which 

 has been printed in the ' Philosophical Transactions ' " to compound 

 for their annual contributions for the sum of Forty Pounds, instead 

 of Sixty Pounds, disappears in the next edition ; and in the year 

 1887 a further remnant of the distinction disappears by the removal 

 from the List of Fellows of the marginal letter P, which had hitherto 

 been placed against the names of those Fellows who had contributed 

 a paper to the ' Philosophical Transactions.' 



At the present time the * Proceedings of the Royal Society ' has 

 reached the sixtieth volume. All the volumes are still in print except 

 vols. 7, 9, 10, 14, and 15, and are sold at a uniform price of 21s. 

 per volume, no reduction being made to the Fellows of the Society. 



CATALOGUE OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS.* 



The Royal Society's ' Catalogue of Scientific Papers,' is the 

 outcome of a movement which dates back nearly forty years. At the 

 Glasgow meeting of the British Association which was held in 1855, 

 a communication from Professor Henry, of Washington, was read, 

 " containing a proposal for the publication of [a catalogue of] philo- 

 sophical memoirs scattered throughout the Transactions of Societies 

 in Europe and America, with the offer of co-operation on the part of 

 the Smithsonian Institute.'* This proposal was referred to a Com- 

 mittee consisting of Mr. Cayley, Mr. Grant, and Professor (now Sir 

 George Gabriel) Stokes ; and their report was presented next year at 

 the Cheltenham meeting of the Association. The scheme set forth in 

 this report was that of a catalogue embracing only the mathematical 

 and physical sciences, but comprising a subject catalogue as well as 

 a catalogue according to the names of authors. There were to be 

 paid editors, " familiar with the several great branches respectively 

 of the sciences to which the catalogue relates," and the work was to 

 include, besides Transactions and Proceedings of Societies, journals, 

 ephemerides, volumes of observations, and " other collections not 

 coming under any of the preceding heads." 



In this form the scheme came came before the Royal Society in 

 March, 1857, General Sabine having requested, on the part of the 

 British Association, the co-operation of the Society in the under- 

 taking. The scheme, after discussion, was narrowed to a manuscript 

 catalogue, the question of printing being deferred ; it was to be a 

 catalogue of periodical works in the Royal Society's library only; 

 the suggested American co-operation, moreover, was dispensed with, 

 and the work undertaken at the Society's own charge. In one im- 

 portant respect, however, the scheme was greatly widened, for the 

 idea of confining the catalogue to the mathematical and physical 



* Eeprinted in part from ' Nature,' vol. 45, p. 338. 



