REPORT OF CLUB S DELEGATE. 309
recently, was for many years at the head of that very important
Institution, the Science Museum at South Kensington—a museum
which, I am sure, all those who have visited it lately will ack-
nowledge, reveals the wide outlook and skilful planning of its
late Director.
The title of Sir Henry Lyons's address was "Scientific
Societies and Museums," and he said that, in his work during
the last twenty years of making available to others scientific and
technical information, he had been much impressed by the need
that existed for fuller organisation in this respect—by the great
extent of the resources now in existence on the one hand and the
real difficulties which workers might experience in gaining access
to them on the other. In this very important task of making
all kinds of information readily available he saw no more hopeful
prospect than in the co-operation of the scientific society, the
library and the museum. Each of these had its own special
mode of distributing information and they offered much to the
scientific student and worker, who, however, did not always
know how to utilise them to the fullest extent.
He pointed out that the discussions in local scientific societies,
although not always attractive to some of the members, often
proved of the greatest value to workers in other fields. Instru-
ments and methods evolved in one branch of science could often
be usefully taken over and adopted in quite different branches
and helpful suggestions could come from quite unexpected
quarters. Members of such societies exchanged views and
acquired information over a much wider field than that covered
by their own special activities and many facts were brought to
light which would otherwise have remained hidden.
In the case of libraries much had already been done by
co-operation to make the vast stores of information contained
in books and periodicals available to scientific workers all over
the country. Through the National Central Library and the
Science Library at the Science Museum, local libraries can now
obtain for their readers access to foreign and home publications
on a most extensive scale. In illustration of this it was stated
that the Science Library alone received well over 8,000 scientific
and technical publications, that it had some 230,000 volumes
in stock dealing with almost every branch of science and tech-