on Radio-active springs, the character of Radium Emanation, and so on.  If it did, it would doubtless get precisely the same results that we are complaining of in the case of the Woman’s Club.  A man whose specialty is thermodynamics might be told off to prepare a paper on Radio-active Elements in Rocks—­a subject in which he is not interested.  He could have nothing new nor original to say on the subject and his paper would be a mere compilation.  It would not even be a good compilation, for his interest and his skill would lie wholly in another direction.  The good results that the society does get are wholly dependent on the fact that each writer is full of new information that he desires, above all things, to communicate to his fellow-members.

In the preparation of such a paper, one needs, of course, to read, and often to read widely.  Much of the reading will be done in connection with the work described, or even before it is begun.  No one wishes to undertake an investigation that has already been made by someone else, and so the first thing that a competent investigator does is to survey his field and ascertain what others have accomplished in it.  This task is by no means easy, for such information is often hidden in journals and transactions that are difficult to reach, and the published indexes of such material, though wonderfully advanced on the road toward perfection in the past twenty years, have yet far to travel before they reach it, Not only the writer’s description of what he has done or ascertained, but the character of the work itself; the direction it takes—­the inferences that he draws from it, will be controlled and coloured by what he reads of others’ work.  And even if he finds it easy to ascertain what has been done and to get at the published accounts and discussions of it, the mass may be so great that he has laid out for him a course of reading that may last many months.

But mark the spirit with which he attacks it!  He is at work on something that seems to him supremely worth while.  He is labouring to find out truth, to dissipate error, to help his fellow-men to know something or to do something.  The impulse to read, and to read much and thoroughly, is so powerful that it may even need judicious repression.  The difference between this kind of reading and that done in the preparation of a paper to fill a place in a set programme hardly needs emphasis.

The preparation of papers for professional and technical societies has been dwelt upon at such length, because I see no reason why the impulse to reading that it furnishes cannot also be placed at the disposal of the woman’s club; and I shall have some suggestions toward this end in a future article.