24 
Proceedings of the Royal Society 
would feel discouraged by the removal of that sympathising audi- 
tory. Have we not all heard with patience, sometimes almost 
with interest and admiration, papers read, from which we must 
afterwards have confessed to ourselves if not to others that we 
were able to carry little or nothing away? Yet that intelligent con- 
course of partially instructed persons gives life to the meeting, 
sanction and encouragement to the really knowing, a taste for 
knowledge, respect for its professors, and some portions at least 
of positive acquirements to those who are not so. I believe that 
we ignore too much this element as inherent in the constitu- 
tion of our learned societies. If we continue to do so, we shall 
degenerate (I venture to call it a degeneracy) into mere publish- 
ing clubs, whose Transactions are read by a select few, but which 
exist and shine by a mere “ lumen siccumf — disembodied exis- 
tences claiming no sympathies, calling forth no regard, combining 
no diversities of interest.* 
* I may perhaps be allowed to call attention to a striking change (on the 
whole) in the character of the publications of learned societies; I mean the 
great detail into which the papers generally run, especially in those on expe- 
rimental Physics, mixed Mathematics, and Natural History. The bulk of 
these communications is, it may be feared, too often out of proportion to the 
intrinsic value of the matter which they contain. It is by no means without 
example to see the pages of Transactions (as well Foreign as British) occupied by 
a description of experiments of which the results were merely negative, and by 
mathematical investigations with no less indefinite conclusions. Such papers 
are rarely read by any one. They increase the bulk and expense of Trans- 
actions, and bewilder the unaided student. Even in cases less extreme they 
are encumbrances to scientific literature. An author, who has before him 
no fear of a printer’s bill, or the remonstrances of an impatient publisher, is 
but too apt to please himself by expanding a small amount of matter over a 
goodly number of those handsome quarto pages, in which his lucubrations 
appear so advantageously to the eye. Even where numerical precision in the 
results is of primary consequence, excessive elaboration in printing the steps 
of calculation and instrumental corrections is often unnecessary, as well as 
extreme minuteness in describing forms of apparatus, and results of chemical 
reactions, especially where such details are not remote from common appre- 
hension. A stricter editorial censorship than the Councils of societies usually 
venture to exert (similar in kind, though not in degree, to that which the 
editors of our leading periodicals exercise over contributors not less eminent 
in their departments), seems to be called for, by the expanding bulk of the 
volumes published by learned Bodies. 
An evil nearly allied to this, is the fragmentary manner in which authors 
are apt to contribute the results of tlieir inquiries. This is a consequence of 
