The use of objective prisms in conjunction with the large area coverage afforded by Schmidt telescopes provides a very powerful means of detecting large numbers of emission-line galaxies, and allows one to study their large scale distribution. An important question that has yet to be fully addressed is the relationship between the number-magnitude distributions of the normal field galaxy and emission-line galaxy populations. A comparison such as this would effectively probe the evolution with

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... me of these active objects. For example, study of the distant (z = 0.458) cluster of galaxies associated with 3C 295 (Dressler & Gunn 1983) indicates that emission-line objects may have been far more numerous in the past than at present. As a preliminary investigation in advance of a larger project, we report here on a search for emission-line galaxies in four United Kingdom 1.2m Schmidt Telescope (UKST) objective prism fields.