A Librarian's Open Shelf: Essays on Various Subjects

by Arthur E. Bostwick

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 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.

Meanwhile, I shall doubtless be told that it is unfair to compare the woman’s club, with its didactic aim, and the scientific association of trained and interested investigators. It is true that we have plenty of clubs—some of men alone, some of both sexes—whose object is to listen to interesting and instructive papers on a set subject, often forming part of a pre-arranged programme. These, however, need our attention here only so far as the papers are prepared by members of the club, and in this case they are in precisely the same class as the woman’s club. In many cases, however, the paper is merely the excuse for a social gathering, perhaps at a dinner or a luncheon. Of course if the paper or lecture is by an expert invited to give it, the case falls altogether outside of the region that we are exploring.

I am condemning here all clubs, formed for an avowed educational or cultural purpose, that adopt set programmes and assign the subjects to their own members. I am deploring the kind of reading to which this leads, the kind of papers that are prepared in this way, and the kind of thought and action that are the inevitable outcome.

It would seem that the women’s clubs now form an immense majority of all organisations of this kind and that there are reasons for warning women that they are specially prone to this kind of mistake.

The diversity of interests of the average man, the wideness of his contacts—the whole tradition of his sex—tends to minimise the injury that may be done to him, intellectually and spiritually, by anything of this kind. The very fact that he is the woman’s inferior spiritually, and in many cases, in intellect, also—although probably not at the maximum—relieves him, in great part, of the odium attaching to the error that has been described. Women are becoming keenly alive to the deficiencies of their sex-tradition; they are trying to broaden their intellectual contacts—that is the great modern feminist movement. Some of those who are active in it are making two mistakes—they are ignoring the differences between the sexes and they are trying to substitute revolution for evolution. In this latter error they are in very good company—hardly one of the great and the good has not made it, at some time and in some way. Revolution is always the outcome of a mistake. The mistake may be antecedent and irrevocable, and the revolution therefore necessary, but this is rarely the case. The revolutionist runs a risk common to all who are in a hurry—he may break the object of his attention instead of moving it. When he wants to hand you a dish he hits it with a ball-bat. Taking a reasonable amount of time is better in the long run.

That there is no royal road to knowledge has long been recognised. The trouble with most of us is that we have interpreted this to mean that the acquisition of knowledge must always be a distasteful process. On the contrary, the vivid interest that is the surest guide to knowledge is also the surest smoother of the path. Given the interest that lures the student on, and he will spend years in surmounting rocks and breaking through thorny jungles, realising their difficulties perhaps, but rejoicing the more when those difficulties prove no obstacles.

The fact that the first step toward accomplishment is to create an interest has long been recognised, but attempts have been made too often to do it by devious ways, unrelated to the matter in hand. Students have been made to study history or algebra by offering prizes to the diligent and by threatening the slothful with punishment. More indirect rewards and punishments abound in all our incitements to effort and need not be mentioned here. They may often be effective, but the further removed they are from direct personal interest in the subject, the weaker and the less permanent is the result. You may offer a boy a dollar to learn certain facts in English history, but those facts will not be fixed so well or so lastingly in his mind as those connected with his last year’s trip to California, which he remembers easily without offer of reward or threat of punishment.