under nine catagories, as indicated in the following list, where the approximate number of words and percentage of total space alloted to material of each class is also given.
| Number of Words |
Per Cent. of Space | ||||
| Reports of proceedings | 14,420 | 26 | |||
| General information about the congress | 10,510 | 19 | |||
| Reports of social functions | 10,310 | 19 | |||
| Personal notes | 6,720 | 12 | |||
| Interviews | 5,020 | 9 | |||
| Accounts of geological excursions | 4,020 | 7 | |||
| Reports on individual papers | 3,160 | 6 | |||
| Editorials | 1,240 | 2 | |||
| Discussions of scientific questions of popular interest | 120 | 6 | |||
About twenty-six per cent, of the space of the text was given to a more or less formal record of the proceedings of the congress, its general sessions, and the sessions of its various sections. A large part of this space was given to the reporting of the addresses of welcome by the government officials and of the replies to these addresses. In the preparation of copy of this kind the reportorial staffs of our large dailies are trained experts and this part of the work was well performed. Not so with the reporting of the professional papers and discussions! Some of the reporters wisely inserted merely the titles of the papers which were read, and the names of the authors.
It is evident that many of these papers were such that reporting even their title seems to have been quite purposeless in a daily paper. The giving of an intelligent statement of their contents by anybody but a specialist would have been impossible. It may have been useless to attempt reporting the papers with such titles as "A physico-chemical contribution to the study of dolomitization"; "On regional granitization"; "Fractional crystallization, the prime factor in the differentiation of rock magmas," and some others. How utterly hopeless it is for the reporter, in journalistic haste, to present to the general reader a comprehensible abstract of a scientific paper, is evident from one report made of a paper on some explorations in South America, by an American geologist. The author is mentioned as attributing the presence of great interior basins to the unequal warping of the earth in the process of elevation. To illustrate this point the reporter then quotes the gentleman as follows:
