Volume 8, 1955 - The Arctic Circle - Home

VOL. YIll NO.3THE ARCTIC CIRCULAR4"Ordered, by The House of Commons, to be Printed••• ", on suchand such a date. These House of Commons papers form a numberedseries for each session beginning anew with Paper No.1 for thenew session. To ::ite them by number, it is usually necessary togive the sessional year to identify a paper. Normally the SessionalPaper number is in chronological sequence throughout the year,but occasionally where a second session ha3 begun in that sameyear, a new sequenc~ will be started, for example, amongst theArctic Papers, H. C. -501 of the 1852 Session (1852k) was printed on22 June 1852, and H.C. -82 of the 1852-53 Session (1852m) wasprinted on 20 December 1852, near the beginning of the new session.lSessional Papers of the House of Commons record materialcovering a great variety of subjects, much of it being in the formof correspondence, journals, or as reports of ParliamentaryCommittees. " •••1 do not think that there is anyone who morevalues the labours of Parliamentary Committees than myself.They obtain for the country an extraordinary mass of valuableinformation which probably would not otherwise be at hand oravailable; and formed as they necessarily are of chosen men fromthe two most important bodies of the State, their Reports are pregnantwith prudent and sagacious suggestions for the improvementof the administration of affairs." (Lord Beaconsfield in Hansard,3rd Series, Vol. 235 (1877) p. 1478)."Parliamentary Papers do not usually have authors ortitles in the commonly accepted sense •••• The paper cover andtitle-page may have the short title at its head and a longer title,consisting of the whole or part of the terms of reference, in itscentre; and sometimes none of the words used in the ~'hort title •••are to be found in the 'long' title." (Ford and Ford, 1953, p. ix).The use of the short and long title by two different authors forthe same paper has occasionally been a source of ambiguity.The pagination of volumes of Sessional Papers of bothHouses was not done at the ticne of printing. The p::.ges of somevolumes were ('+fkiaJly nUrlbered in on"',"1:.script, but the samevolumes were also issued completely bour.d, without being paginated.I1. In the bibliography given below, the da~e of publication of thepaper has been used, exclusive of ti,e sessional date, and apurely chronological arrangement adopted.I