Abstract
PROF. TAIT'S admirable remarks on the moral obligation laid upon “every society whose memoirs are worthy of appearing in print” to disseminate its publications must have awakened a cordial response in the minds of many whose lot is cast in some provincial city or outlying focal college. It is only too true that the volumes of the Cambridge Philosophical Transactions are “almost inaccessible” to many like myself, who often find themselves tantalised by the desire of consuming some of the classical masterpieces of research or analysis there in enshrined, which, therefore, are not to be consulted without a pilgrimage to Cambridge or to London. Yet I hardly understand why Prof. Tait should—save for the occasion of reviewing the happily exhumed memoirs of Prof. Stokes—have chosen the Cambridge Transactions as the one instance of “inaccessibility,” since it is at least equally to be regretted that a memoir published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh—and there are masterpieces of research and analysis by the score irrevocably buried therein—equally necessitates a pilgrimage on the part of the provincial reader. I, for one, shall be extremely glad if Prof. Tait will act upon his own prescription—that simple, easy cure—and consider himself “bound to disseminate as widely as possible” the memoirs which he has himself consigned to those very inaccessible Transactions. I doubt, indeed, if even Prof. Tait has realised the difficulty besetting a would-be reader of original memoirs and researches, who is compelled to journey from one shore of England to the other in order to consult the Edinburgh Transactions, the Cambridge Transactions, the Comptes Rendus, the volumes of Poggendorff's Annalen, or those of the Annales de Chémie et de Physique, or the memoirs of any one of the five great Academies of the European Continent.
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THOMPSON, S. Diffusion of Scientific Memoirs. Nature 29, 171 (1883). https://doi.org/10.1038/029171a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/029171a0
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