lviii 
PEOCEEDINGS, 
them, but 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 he of 
interest to all our Societies, and it is an eminently practical one ; 
hut I must confess that it is drier than Dew-ponds are, or should he. 
I will introduce it by giving a recent experience of my own, chiefly 
as an illustration that the title of a paper should give as clear an 
idea of its contents as can be given in a few words. 
I am compiling, for a work to be published by the Bay Society, 
a Bibliography of the Freshwater Bhizopoda. I knew that in the 
‘ Monthly Microscopical Journal,’ for nine years the organ of the 
Boyal Microscopical Society, there was a paper on a presumed 
freshwater rhizopod from the New Forest to which the name 
Pseudo-amoeba violacea had been given, but I could not remember 
the title of the paper or the author’s name, and the Journal has 
neither table of contents nor list of plates. I searched the indexes 
to the eighteen volumes under the catchwords “Protozoa,” 
“ Bhizopoda,” “ Pseudo-amoeba, ”“Freshwater,”and “NewForest.” 
Under not one of these could I find a reference to the paper, and it 
was only by turnihg over the pages that the plate illustrating it 
caught my eye in vol. x. The paper is by Dr. B. L. Maddox, and 
its title is “On an Organism found in Fresh-pond Water.” It is 
indexed under “ Maddox ” and “ Organism ” only. 
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 a third is the unsatisfactory title of the paper. The 
newly-proposed genus does not appear in either title or index, and 
there is no indication of the kind of organism (believed to be 
a rhizopod), nor of the locality in which it was found. The title 
should have been something like this : “On Pseudo-amoeba violacea , 
a presumed new Freshwater Bhizopod from the New Forest,” and 
the principal words in this title, at least, should have been indexed. 
I need scarcely explain how all who write similar papers, and all 
editors of the publications of Scientific Societies, may apply this 
criticism and relieve the labours of others, especially of compilers 
of bibliographies. 
I have examined the bound volumes of most of your publications 
at the Office of the Association, and I find that the majority have 
the very serious fault that the date of publication of the several 
numbers or parts of which they are composed is not given. The 
dates may have been, and probably in most cases were, on the 
covers; but the covers are not bound up in the volumes, as they 
ought to have been—the first leaf at least—which would in most 
cases give date and contents, and should preferably be bound at the 
end of each volume. When the dates are not given in the bound 
volume it is impossible to ascertain when any particular paper was 
published, and therefore impossible to enter it in a bibliography as 
