394 REPORT—1904. 
matter. Therefore he would ask the Delegates that afternoon to pass 
a formal resolution that, if this resolution were adopted by the General 
Committee, certain persons be appointed as representatives of the 
Delegates upon that Committee. It would be for that meeting to suggest 
the names. He suggested that they should not appoint too many, and 
that they should be such as would be fairly certain to attend the 
meetings. 
After a hearty vote of thanks had been passed to the Chairman for 
the action he had taken, he vacated the chair in favour of Dr. Tempest 
Anderson. 
It was unanimously resolved that, if the resolution referred to were 
passed by the General Committee, the following Delegates be appointed as 
representatives of the Corresponding Societies on the proposed Com- 
mittee—namely, the Chairman of the Conference of Delegates, Principal 
E. H. Griffiths ; the Chairman of the Corresponding Societies Committee, 
Mr. W. Whitaker ; and the Secretary of the Committee and of the Con- 
ference, Mr. F. W. Rudler. 
Mr. John Hopkinson, F.L.S., F.G.8., introduced the following 
subject :— 
On the Conformity of the Publications of Scientific Societies with certain 
Bibliographical Requirements. 
A few years ago I suggested for discussion at our Conference the 
subject of Dew-ponds ; and although we had a very interesting discussion 
upon them I heard it remarked that it was scarcely of sufficient general 
interest to the Corresponding Societies. 
The subject of my remarks on the present occasion should be of 
interest to all our Societies, and it is an eminently practical one ; but I 
must confess that it is drier than Dew-ponds are, or should be. I will 
introduce it by giving a recent experience of my own, chiefly as an 
illustration of the requirement that the title of a paper should give as 
clear an idea of its contents as can be given in a few words. 
IT am compiling, for a work to be published by the Ray Society, a 
Bibliography of the Freshwater Rhizopoda. I knew that in the ‘Monthly 
Microscopical Journal,’ for ten years the organ of the Royal Micro- 
scopical Society, there was a paper on a presumed freshwater rhizopod 
from the New Forest to which the name Pseudo ameba violacea had 
been given, but I could not remember the title of the paper or the 
author’s name. I searched the indexes to twenty volumes under the 
catch-words ‘ Protozoa,’ ‘ Rhizopoda,’ ‘ Pseudo-ameba,’ ‘ Freshwater,’ and 
‘ New Forest.’ Under not one of these could I find a reference to the 
paper, and it was only by turning over the pages that the plate illustrat- 
ing it caught my eye in vol.x. The paper is by Dr. R. L. Maddox, 
and its title is ‘On an Organism found in Fresh-pond Water.’ It is 
indexed only under ‘ Maddox’ and ‘Organism.’ There are three faults 
here to which I wish to draw your attention. One is the absence of a 
table of contents and of a list of the plates. Such a table is, or should 
be, very much shorter than an index, and it enables a paper on any 
particular subject to be found much more readily than by the index. 
Another is the meagre indexing ; and the third is the unsatisfactory title 
of the paper. The newly-proposed genus does not appear in either title or 
index, there is no indication of the kind of organism—believed to be 
