1.Introduction. The theory of thin elastic shells is defined for present purposes as a system of two-dimensional differential equations and boundary conditions for the determination of three-dimensional states of stress and displacement in elastic bodies bounded by two parallel or nearly parallel surfaces in space and a third surface which is perpendicular or nearly perpendicular to the other two surfaces.Shell theory when defined in this way is an approximate theory in the sense that exact solutions of the equations of a shell theory are, in general, approximate solutions of the original three-dimensional problem.For the purpose of the present considerations, we distinguish two kinds of approaches to the derivation of shell theory. The first approach depends on the introduction of plausible assumptions concerning the nature of the variations of stresses and displacements across the thickness of the shell into suitably averaged forIllS of the basic three-dimensional elasticity equations, either directly or by -yay of the direct methods of the calculus of variations. Examples of this ap-:)foach are the derivations by Love [9] The second approach to the derivation of shell theory depends on the idea that the two dimensional equations of such a theory should be the result of applying a method of asymptotic integration to the original three-dimensional system of differential equations of the theory of elasticity. The present writer's outline of such an analysis for the case of rotationally symmetric deformations of circular cylindrical shells-the principal element of which consisted in the introduction of appropriately scaled dimensionless variables into the equations of the three-dimensional theory, at the outset, anticipating the results of the asymptotic two-dimensional theory-was developed in the dissertation of Johnson [4] and in a subsequent paper by Johnson and the writer [6]. Johnson's dissertation, as well as a later paper of his [5], also deals with the problem of unsymmetrical deformations of circular cylindrical shells, where it is found that separate asymptotic expansions of the solution of the three-dimensional problem are needed to establish separate portions of the equations of shell theory which are associated with separate characteristic-length properties of the solutions of these equations.Subsequent work by means of the asymptotic integration approach includes the present writer's results for the problem of the edge effect in symmetrical bending of shells of revolution [16], results by Reiss which recover our earlier results for symmetrical bending of circular cylindrical shells, supplemented by considerations on the influence of edge zones with width of the order of the shell thickness [11], results by Reiss which are equivalent to parts of Johnson's results for unsymmetrical bending, without consideration of the need for separate ex-