232 
MCGEE. 
nary papers of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, 
and in the small parts and separate papers of the Transac¬ 
tions of the American Society of Civil Engineers. With a 
few exceptions, the vigorous and long-lived serials are those 
appearing in small parts, and the exceptions are mostly ex¬ 
plained by another tendency. 
A fifth tendency, which is apparently opposed by the last, 
but which really explains many of the exceptions to it, is 
against the publication of monthly serials; or, perhaps more 
properly, against the publication of regular units at short 
and regular intervals: It finds expression in the transforma¬ 
tion of the Journals of the Academy of Natural Sciences of 
Philadelphia and the Boston Society of Natural History, and 
of the Proceedings of the former society and of the Geological 
Society of London from regular monthlies into irregular 
serials, by the irregularity in appearance of the nominally 
monthly parts of the Transactions of the American Society 
of Civil Engineers and of the Quarterly Journal of the Geo¬ 
logical Society of London, and by the dearth of monthlies 
among the publications of the younger societies. All the 
older societies, save the American Association for the Ad¬ 
vancement Science, have tested monthly publication, but 
none of the societies now issue regular monthlies, and it is 
evident that this mode of publication does not survive 
under existing conditions. 
There is an evident tendency against the publication of 
administrative records per se: This tendency is exhibited 
by the decadence of the Proceedings of the Geological Society 
of London, more decidedly by the combination of the ad¬ 
ministrative and scientific records of two of the younger 
societies (the Philosophical Society of Washington and the 
American Institute of Mining Engineers) and the joint issue 
of the Proceedings and Transactions of the third (the Ameri¬ 
can Society of Civil Engineers), and still more emphatically 
and very curiously in the transformation of the Proceedings 
of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and of 
the Boston Society of Natural History (and in less measure 
