PROCEEDINGS OP THE THIRD ENTOMOLOGICAL MEETING 11 



in which it appears. Separate pubhcations (for example, books ; although 

 nothing should be considered as a book unless it contains a minimum 

 number of pages) cannot easily be legislated for but there seems to be 

 no end to the various serial publications in which entomological work 

 appears now-a-days. Some time ago the Imperial Bureau of Entomology 

 gave an mcomplete census of present-day periodicals in which entomo- 

 logical articles are published, and this list, so far as I remember, came to 

 over seventeen hundred. It is absolutely impossible to see all these, 

 even in the best hbraries anywhere, and even a useful abstract hke the 

 " Zoological Record "' is not really complete. Many important papers 

 are published in Transactions of Societies, etc., which to the entomological 

 world contain .little else of importance and no private worker and few 

 public libraries can take in complete sets of such Transactions merely 

 for the sake of an occasional paper which otherwise is overlooked or not 

 accessible when required for reference. To take the case of India only, 

 we have entomological papers appearing in the Memoirs, Bulletins and 

 Annual Reports of the Agricultural and Forest Departments, the Memoirs 

 and Records of thi Indian Museum, the Asiatic Society's Journal, the 

 Bombay Natural History Society's Journal, the Indian Journal of Medical 

 Research, the Journal of the Indian Tea Association, the Planters' Chro- 

 nicle, Spoha Zeylanica, and half a hundred other Bulletins, Reports, 

 Annuals and what-not issued by various Government Departments, 

 Native States and others, although hardly one of these publications 

 is devoted entirely to Entomology. I have dealt with tliis in my pro- 

 posals for expansion and centrahzation of entomological work in India 

 and only wish to draw your attention now to the large mass of current 

 literature already in existence in India. But India is a comparatively 

 small contributor to entomological hterature and we require a world- 

 wide scheme to centralize work as much as possible. 



My idea, roughly, is tliis, that the leading entomological (or zoological) 

 societies or workers in every civiUzed country should consider the Uterary 

 output of their own country and compile a limited list of pubhcations 

 which would be considered official from the point of view of scientific 

 worth. For example, in England a dozen to twenty (at the outside) 

 pubhcations — such as the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal, 

 Linnean, Zoological, and Entomological Societies, the Entomologist, the 

 Entomologists' Monthly Magazine, the Entomologists' Record and a few 

 other leading publications in pure and appHed entomology, including a 

 few provincial pubhcations — should suffice for all scientific work. If 

 anyone wished to pubhsh in non-official pubhcations they could do so, 

 and their papers would of comse be on record but would possess no 

 scientific value. The effect of this would be that the amateur and casual 



