amount expended on the Transactions was £1094, but only £276 of this was offset by sales income. Sabine felt this was more than the Society could comfortably sustain. The print run of the journal was 1000 copies. Around 500 of these went to the fellowship, in return for their membership dues, and since authors now received up to 150 off-prints for free, to circulate through their personal networks, the demand for the Transactions through the book trade must have been limited. The concerns with cost eventually led to a change in the printer in 1877 from Taylor & Francis to Harrison & Sons—the latter was a larger commercial printer, able to offer the Society a more financially viable contract, although it was less experienced in printing scientific works. While expenditure was a worry for the Treasurer, as Secretary (from 1854), George Gabriel Stokes was preoccupied with the actual content of the Transactions and his extensive correspondence with authors over his thirty-one-year term. He took up most of his time beyond his duties as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge. Stokes was paramount in establishing a more formalized refereeing process at the Royal Society. It was not until Stokes' Presidency ended in 1890 that his influence over the journal diminished. The introduction of fixed terms for Society officers precluded subsequent editors from taking on Stokes' mantle and meant that the Society operated its editorial practices more collectively than it had done since the mechanisms for it were established in 1752. By the mid-nineteenth century, getting a paper published in the Transactions still relied on the paper first being read by a Fellow. Many papers were sent immediately for printing in abstract form in Proceedings of the Royal Society. But those which were being considered for printing in full in Transactions were usually sent to two referees for comment before the final decision was made by the Committee of Papers. During Stokes' time, authors were given the opportunity to discuss their paper at length with him before, during and after its official submission to the Committee of Papers. In 1887, the Transactions split into series "A" and "B", dealing with the physical and biological sciences respectively. In 1897, the model of collective responsibility for the editing of the Transactions was emphasized by the re-establishment of the Sectional Committees. The six sectional committees covered mathematics, botany, zoology, physiology, geology, and (together) chemistry and physics, and