t 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 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 do