Page:Index to Trans. N.Z. Inst. 1to40.djvu/7



Index of the first forty volumes of the "Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute" has been compiled, in accordance with a resolution of the Board of Governors, by Mr. Riddick, of the Government Printing Office. An index of the first eight volumes was issued in 1877, and one to the first seventeen volumes in 1886. Both of these are superseded by the present Index. This Index, however, deals only with the authors and titles of the various papers, and no attempt has been made to index the subject-matter of the articles themselves. The first part, the index of the authors, presented no difficulty. In the second part, dealing with the subject-matter of the titles to the different articles, the question of classification was an extremely difficult one, and the system adopted can only be looked upon as a compromise. In some subjects, such as Botany and Geology, further subdivision would no doubt have been desirable, but it was found that this was almost impossible, owing to the fact that many of the papers are of a general nature, and deal with several branches of the subject. The subdivisions under Zoology do not pretend to represent the present scientific opinion on the subject, but are those which seemed most practically useful in classifying a number of miscellaneous zoological articles written between the years 1867 and 1907, and for the same reason it has been kept as nearly as possible parallel with the classification adopted in the "Index Faunæ Novæ Zealandiæ."

In the Proceedings of the different branches of the New Zealand Institute, only those papers have been indexed of which some abstract has been given; papers of which only the title is given and which do not appear in the Transactions are not indexed.