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In Canada, amateur athletes who receive government funding in support of their training are required to sign an agreement with the respective sport organization in order to qualify for the assistance. This illustrates how legal practices are increasingly being used in sport. It is important for participants in sport to understand what the legal elements of such practices are in order to identify those situations in which they have been applied properly, in- accurately, or inappropriately. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the content of the agreements signed by Canadian athletes and the procedures by which they are implemented. The result of this analysis is a list of issues that athletes and administrators may wish to address or improve in order to provide a more fair agreement between the parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Natural History Society of New Brunswick based in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, which operated from 1862 until 1932. The organization was responsible for geological research and public education. The society's lead geologist was George Matthew who published more than 200 scientific papers. The society published the "Bulletin of the Natural History Society of New Brunswick" from 1862 until 1917 which published over 800 lectures and speeches. The society was created in part to provide a scientific library for amateur scientists and was important because the Great Fire of 1877 destroyed many local personal libraries, but the society's library collection remained untouched. The society's library was the basis for the collection of the New Brunswick Museum.

This article presents a commentary on a paper by Robert A. Stebbins in a previous issue of The American Sociologist which provided an account of professional and amateur sociology in the U.S. The British organization, Mass Observation existed in a relatively nonintrusive society with (as compared to the U.S.) greater concern for one's own and other people's privacy. Canada and Great Britain may in this respect have more built-in defenses against the risks of some kinds of amateur sociology that the U.S. would have. However, according to the commenter, Stebbins already anticipates this objection by requiring amateurs to be supervised and to start with a certain amount of instruction and proper cautionary comments. By engaging primarily in the use of unobtrusive measures and observations, the amateur will avoid the risks of harm to which Stebbins is already sensitive. The commenter relates that one of the public areas in which he has encouraged such unobtrusive observations is in churches, where the observer in outward appearance is similar to the congregation and hence not seen as an intruder. According to him, he has had a fair amount of experience with undergraduate amateurs of the sort described.