LOCAL SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES.
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modern advances of science without either going through a
course of special reading in text-books of various grades—for
which he has no time—or attempting to master a treatise which
he can hardly be expected to understand without a preliminary
training of some sort.
Moreover, it must be remembered that the intelligent
amateur no longer necessarily belongs to a class outside scien-
tific circles as he did formerly, but he is frequently quite learned
in one branch of science though he may be the merest amateur
in another. And yet when he travels outside his own subject
he is in danger of being placed in a position somewhat similar
to that of his predecessor, the amateur of sixty years ago. For
him the introductory text-book is too laborious and in a sense
too elementary ; the treatise is too technical and is expressed in
a language which he cannot understand. On the other hand,
the magazine or newspaper article he dare not trust ; it is true
that excellent articles upon scientific subjects do from time to
time appear in the popular magazines, but they are rare ; more-
over the magazine article comes to-day and is gone to-morrow,
and cannot always be secured when wanted. I do not forget
that several good scientific journals exist which appeal to a
wider public than the specialist ; Science Progress in particular,
happily revived during the last few years, aims at a very high
standard of information, and with conspicuous success. But
even here the articles are too often expressed in language which
cannot be understood by the ordinary reader.
So far I have referred only to the condition of scientific
literature in relation to the amateur. But in this Association and
at this Conference we are concerned rather with the spoken than
with the written word ; I have only deferred the consideration of
scientific meetings in order to draw a parallel.
For if we turn to Scientific Societies, is not what I have said
about scientific books still more true about the societies ? The
greater scientific societies are becoming every day more highly
specialised both in their publications and in their membership;
there are very few which occupy themselves with more than one
branch of science ; and even those few which profess to cover a
wider field break up into sections, each of which is far too sharply
divided from the others.
If it be difficult for the intelligent amateur to extract informa-
tion from the scientific text-book or treatise, how much more
difficult is it for him to learn anything from the proceedings and
meetings of these societies ? If the language of even the text-
books is so thickly beset with technical expressions that it is hard
to understand, how much more unintelligible is the specialist
jargon of a society in which it often happens that a paper,
though read in a meeting of specialists, can only be fully followed
by two or three of those present ?