ON UNDERGROUND TEAIPERATURE. 77 



Committee's slow-action thermometers, in holes bored in the sides of the 

 shafts. 



The Committee desii-e to express their regret at the loss of their 

 valuable member, Mr. Pengelly. 



The Uniformity of Size of Pages of Scientific Societies' Puhlications. — 

 Beport of the Committee, consistinq of Professor S. P. Thompson 

 (Chairman), Mr. G. H. Bryan, 'Dr. C. V. Burton, Mr. R. T, 

 Glazebrook, Dr. G. Johnstone Stoney, and Mr. J. Swinburne 

 (Secretary). 



[PLATE I.] 



The importance of adopting one or two uniform standard sizes for the 

 pages of scientific publications will be evident to all specialists who have 

 collected reprints of papers on any branch of science, and who have en- 

 deavoured to have them bound into volumes. Such collections are of 

 more than passing interest, and they might, with advantage in many 

 cases, be handed down to posterity as records of work in any particular 

 subject, and it is, therefore, of importance that they should not be spoiled 

 by the omission of one or two papers whose size precludes them from 

 being bound up with the rest. 



The Committee have thought it advisable in their first year to confine 

 their attention chiefly to reporting on the size of the pages of existing 

 mathematical and physical publications, and to deciding on what sizes to 

 recommend as standards. In the latter matter they have been largely 

 guided by the consideration that uniformity has been already to some 

 extent attained, and this report will show that the desired results can be 

 accomplished without making any radical changes in the sizes of the 

 principal journals, and, indeed, without altering most of them at all. 



In deciding whether two papers can or cannot be bound together, the 

 size of the margin is quite as important a factor as the size of the paper. 

 Thus the ' Bulletin of the New York Mathematical Society ' is more than 

 a centimetre wider and two centimetres higher than the ' Report of the 

 British Association,' and yet if it were cut down to the same size it would 

 still have exactly the same margin at the sides, and 6 mm. more margin 

 at the top and bottom of the pages. Again, the ' Proceedings of the 

 Pliy.sical Society ' are printed with the same type as the ' Philosophical 

 Magazine,' although one is medium and the other demy octavo. Hence 

 arises the necessity of taking an internal measurement of the space occu- 

 pied by the letterpress, as well as an external measurement of the size of 

 the paper page. 



This may be estimated as in fig. 1, which represents the opened pages 

 of a book, a, b denote the width and depth of a paper page, c is the 

 distance from the outside edge of the letterpress to the back, and d is the 

 distance from the top of the running headline or number of the page to the 

 bottom of the last line of letterpress, exclusive of the ' signature.' Hence 

 a — c is the margin at the side of the page, and b — d is the sum of the 

 margin at the top and bottom, so that if these are equal each is equal 

 to ^(b-d). 



By adopting a minimum limit for the size of the pages (measured by 

 a, b), and a somewhat smaller maximum limit for the internal measure- 



