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NOTE ABOUT BIOGRAPHIES

The Society was formally constituted in 1878. Most of the persons mentioned in the Archive were dead before that date, and none of them could have known that a Society would one day exist to collect them.

They were, nevertheless, collected. Their notebooks, plates, calipers, and remains passed — as such things do — into the private cabinets of the universities and the wealthy men who fund them, where they sat mislabeled and unread for decades. It was the Society's founding work to go and get them back. What is posted in this public Archive is arranged not by importance but by the order in which the Archive came to understand what it was holding.

A second note, on the register of these files.

The Archive is obliged to acknowledge that the biographical portions of this document are more personal, and personable, than the Society is generally known to be.

They were compiled by a member of the Archive staff over a period of some years, without authorisation and largely after hours, and were discovered only after they had become indispensable. The Council has reviewed the matter twice. On both occasions it declined to order a corrected edition, on the stated grounds that the corrected edition would be read by no one — and on the unstated grounds, which this Archivist will now state, that the files are accurate. The dead in this document were not neutral people. It would be a species of falsification to file them as though they were.

The author's name is withheld at the author's request. The Society apologises for the style. It does not withdraw it.