attention to this phase of the subject.

Most persons will agree, probably, that the average club paper is not
notably worth while. It is written by a person not primarily and vitally
interested in the subject, and it is read to an assemblage most of whom
are similarly devoid of interest--the whole proceeding being more or less
perfunctory. Could it be expected that reading done in connection with
such a performance should be valuable?

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 i