This is worth pondering, because it is a fact that almost all the vital informative literature that is produced at first hand sees the light in connection with clubs and associations—­bodies that publish journals, “transactions” or “proceedings” for the especial purpose of printing the productions of their members.

This literature, for the most part, does not come to the notice of the general reader.  The ordinary books on the technical subjects of which it treats are not raw material, but a manufactured product—­compilations from the original sources.  And the pity of it is that very many of them, often the best of them from a purely literary point of view, are so unsatisfactory, viewed from the point of view of accomplishment.  They do not do what they set out to do; they are full of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, interpolations and omissions.  It is the old story; those who know won’t tell and the task is assumed by those who are eminently able to tell, but don’t know.  The scientific expert despises the public, which is forced to get its information through glib but ignorant expounders.  This is a digression, but it may serve to illuminate the situation, which is that the authoritative literature of special subjects sees the light almost wholly in the form of papers, read before clubs and associations.  Evidently there is nothing in the mere fact that a paper is to be read before a club, to make it trivial or valueless.  Yet how much that is of value to the world first saw the light in a paper read before a woman’s club?  How much original thought, how much discovery, how much invention, how much inspiration, is put into their writing and emanates from their reading?

There must be a fundamental difference of some kind between the constitution and the methods of these two kinds of clubs.  A study of this difference will throw light on the kind of reading that must be done in connection with each and may explain, in great part, why the reading done for women’s club-papers is what it is.

A scientific or technical society exists largely for the purpose of informing its members of the original work that is being done by each of them.  When anyone has accomplished such work or has made such progress that he thinks an account of what he has done would be interesting, he sends a description of it to the proper committee, which decides whether it shall be read and discussed at a meeting, or published in the Proceedings, or both, or neither.  The result depends on the size of the membership, on its activity, and on the value of its work.  It may be that the programme committee has an embarrassment of riches from which to select, or that there is poverty instead.  But in no case does it arrange a programme.  The Physical Society, if that is its name and subject, does not decide that it will devote the meetings of the current season to a consideration of Radio-activity and assign to specified members the reading of papers