Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/758

 742 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

organizations in Great Britain called "Scientific and Learned Societies." These include small new groups, such as the thirty oceanographers who constitute the Challenger Society, and who meet once a quarter in the rooms of the Royal Society in London, and periodically issue a series of oceanographic charts. But among the purely scientific societies, that which attains to the largest membership is the Royal Geographical, with its 4,180 members^ The functional activities of the Geographical Society are described as follows in the Science Year Book:

1. Meetings. Weekly, November to June, evening; anniversary, fourth Monday in May.

2. Publications. The Geographical Journal, monthly; Y ear-Book and Record; and various special publications.

3. Miscellaneous. Medals : Two royal gold medals, the Founder's and the Patron's, awarded annually; and the Victoria medal at intervals. Money grants are also made from trust funds. A fine library of upward of 37,000 books and pamphlets is maintained, and a map-room. The latter receives a government grant of 500 per annum, on condition that the public shall have access to the collection.

Now, the monthly Geographical Journal, the chief organ of the society, is an invaluable publication, but the only person who, in all probability, reads it through is its own editor; and that is as it should be. Life is too short to read the Journal of the Geo- graphical or any other scientific society. But what everyone should do is to utilize the spiritual organization whose visible organs are the whole series of scientific periodicals. To do this we must know how to consult the files of these periodicals; in other words, how to put, and answer, questions through their pages. All these learned periodicals would be more popular, were the common and obvious fact known to editors and proprietors of newspapers as conceivably some day it may be that the most abstruse and recondite of scientific journals is nothing but a variety of the familiar publication known as Notes and Queries in its higher form, and in its lower forms Tit Bits and Answers. It would, indeed, introduce an agreeable and useful uniformity in periodical nomenclature if there could be one generic name, with adjectival differentiations, such, for instance, as the Zeit-