340 REPORTS ON THE STATIS OF SCIENCE. 
society’s expenditure on their publications and the amount per cent. of 
their income. He deplored the present-day want of conciseness. With 
regard to the easing of the burden of postage, the deputation to the Post- 
master-General showed insuperable difficulties to be surmounted in dis- 
criminating between societies. His society was a rich one and in a different 
position from local societies, but he would like to have more statistics. 
He bore testimony to the loyalty of the amateurs of science and the valuable 
unpaid work that was done. 
Dr. Chalmers Mitchell (Zoological Society) pointed out that the adminis- 
tration of any Government fund for aiding scientific publication would involve 
a very severe scrutiny of the quality of papers read at the meetings of local 
societies. Many such papers would lose their local utility if they were 
reduced merely to the new matter they might contain, whilst the difficulties 
of local societies would be increased if it were known that the publication 
of memoirs could take place only after a rigid censorship. On the other 
hand he expressed his opinion that there was no difficulty in getting good 
new work published by the local societies, and that it was of great im- 
portance that the number of publications in which new contributions to 
science were published should be diminished rather than increased. In 
zoology alone there were already over 1,200 publications in which such new 
work might appear, and even the combined London libraries did not 
contain all of these. He opposed the establishment of the suggested fund. 
The Rev. 'T. R. R. Stebbing said he rather expected to be in the invidious 
position of a single dissentient. But the last two speeches encouraged him to 
hope that his own point of view has its fair share of supporters. Indirectly, 
indeed, it derived assistance from an unexpected quarter last Sunday morning 
in Westminster Abbey, when the Bishop of Colchester was pleading for the 
thousands of clergy with inadequate incomes. He mentioned many futile 
expedients suggested for increasing those incomes. One was that the clergy 
should write. The objection to that was, he said, that a great many of 
them cannot write—meaning, of course, that they cannot write anything of 
saleable, money-getting value. But further, he said, as a rule we don’t 
want them to write; we want only those to write who have a true gift for 
it. The very same rule applies to scientific writing. Again, yesterday 
morning our Chairman in his address alluded to some out of the way 
subject, something like pithecanthropogeography, and explained that when 
he was taking it up he immediately found that innumerable books had been 
written upon it. The fact is that however obscure, however minute the branch 
of science on which a student enters may be, he presently finds that it has 
been handled in a vast variety of widely distributed treatises which it is 
more or less difficult to get hold of. Dr. Chalmers Mitchell has just been 
insisting on this. Now the library of the Zoological Society is perhaps the 
best in the world for zoology, the most accessible, the most friendly; and 
yet the Secretary confesses to this difficulty, and however readily the library 
offers its resources workers in the North of England may not find it easy 
to use them. Why should we go about to increase the complexity of 
scientific literature? The present proposal, at least as originally explained 
to him, must have that effect. It is a proposal which he had strenuously 
opposed before it was made, at any rate before it received its present 
embodiment. When you send round to all the scientific societies in the 
kingdom, inviting them to uphold an appeal to Government for financial 
assistance, naturally in upholding such an appeal many of them will expect 
to share in the spoil. Probably there will not be such societies as the 
famous Royal Polytechnic of Cornwall, the premier, he believed, among 
local scientific institutions, but others of quite different quality, however 
meritorious in their way. Accordingly the grant runs the risk of being 
used, in part at least, for bolstering up ‘pauper’ scientific societies, help- 
ing lame dogs over stiles into fields where lame dogs are not wanted, 
