728 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE.—1914. 
Many such call their publications ‘Annual Reports.’ They may consist of not 
more than one or two sheets octavo (sixteen or thirty-two pages), each Report 
being separately paged. It may take ten or twenty to form a volume sufficiently 
thick to bind. As usually they have neither table of contents nor index, to ascer- 
tain whether a volume thus made up contains a paper on a certain subject nearly 
every page has to be turned over. There is as a rule no indication of the date of 
issue, and this is also usually the case with the separate parts of more pretentious 
publications, which may be called ‘ Journals,’ ‘ Transactions,’ or ‘ Proceedings,” 
at least after the covers have been removed, copies without the covers bound in 
being then absolutely useless to a bibliographer. Sometimes the index appears 
at the beginning, when one naturally looks for it at the end, such index occasion- 
ally being called ‘ Contents.’ An index is, of course, alphabetical, and it is 
advisable that there should be only one, and not separate indexes of names, 
places, and subjects. | Contents should comprise a list of the papers in the 
sequence in which they appear in the volume. 
There is only one other point to which I desire to call attention, and that is 
the nature of the contents of the publications of a Local Natural History 
Society. The papers printed should be almost entirely those giving the results 
of original work, and, at least in a small society, for the sake of economy, as 
little space as possible should be given up to such things as rules and lists of 
members. It will usually suffice when a volume, as already defined, extends over 
several years, as is frequently the case with a small society, to give such things 
once only in each volume. Let me give you examples: one will suffice of the 
wrong way and two of the right way, and I may absolve myself from libel if I 
do not give the name of the society which transgresses. Its last publication is 
called ‘Annual Report and Proceedings.’ It is paged 1-48, not forming part of 
a volume. Except on the cover there is no date nor place of publication. Its 
chief contents are the Rules and Library Rules; Additions to Museum and 
Library ; Financial Statement; Hon. Secretary's, Curator’s, and Sectional Secre- 
taries’ Reports; and Lists of Members, past Presidents, and Associated Societies. 
The only additions to our knowledge of the Natural History of its locality are 
contained in a few pages of the Sectional Secretaries’ Reports. The subscriptions 
of its members exceed 2007. per annum. 
As examples of what I think should be published I will take the last part of 
the ‘ Transactions of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society,’ the Society of 
which our present Chairman, Sir H. George Fordham, is now President, and the 
last part of the ‘Journal of the Hastings and St. Leonards Natural History 
Society ’ issued under the main title of the ‘ Hastings and East Sussex Naturalist.’ 
The Herts Society’s ‘ Transactions’ form Part 3 of Vol. XV., running from 
p. 105 to p. 192, and contain the following papers: Mimicry and Protective 
Resemblance (being the former President’s Address) ; The Building of a Mille- 
pede’s Nest (illustrated) ; Hertfordshire False-scorpions ; Note on the Occurrence 
of Palmodictyon viride in Hertfordshire; The Crustacea of West Herts; The 
Weather of the year 1912 in Hertfordshire; On some Strata recently exposed in 
the Railway Cutting between Oxhey and Pinner; Notes on Birds observed in 
Hertfordshire during the year 1912; Hertfordshire Gentians ; Botanical Observa- 
tions in Hertfordshire during the years 1911 and 1912; Report on Land and Fresh- 
water Mollusca observed in Hertfordshire in 1912; Recent Discoveries of Pre- 
historic Horse Remains in the Valley of the Stort (illustrated) ; Witches’ Brooms 
on the Beech; The Weight-lifting Powers of Wasps; and Report on the Pheno- 
logical Observations in Hertfordshire for the year 1912; with eight pages of 
Proceedings, xvii-xxiv. The papers were read between October 1912 and 
November 1913, and not one can be taken out without all which a bibliographer 
requires to know being on it, for at the bottom of the last page of each paper is 
the line 7'rans. Hertfordshire Nat. Hist. Soc., Vol. XV., Part 3, May 1914. 
The Society is only a small one, the subscriptions of its members scarcely 
ere to 507. per annum. It has published an excellent ‘ Flora of Hertford- 
shire.’ 
“The Hastings and East Sussex Naturalist’ runs from p. 91 to p. 142 of 
Vol. II. The contents of the part are : Autobiographical Note by the Rev. E. N. 
Bloomfield (with portrait) ; Pioneer Work on the Fauna and Flora of the Hastings 
District ; Annual Notes on the Local Fauna and Flora ; Note on Mycene Crocata, 
