274 
THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 
thousands and thousands of people in a 
strictly technical geographic magazine. 
It was obviously necessary to change 
the character of the magazine and to 
adapt it to interest a larger circle of non- 
technical members. We adopted this 
policy with an aim to making the maga- 
zine support the Society. We did not 
mean to lower the scientific standard of 
the magazine and make it simply popu- 
lar, but we wanted to add certain fea- 
tures that would be of interest to every- 
body. 
But in starting out to make a magazine 
that would support the Society, instead 
of the Society being burdened with the 
magazine, a man was of the first neces- 
sity ; if we did not get the right man the 
whole plan would be a failure, and I 
can well remember how our Board of 
Managers discussed this proposed plan, 
and the difficulty of getting a man, and 
how the idea was laughed at that we 
should ever reach a membership of 
lo.ooo. Why, it was ridiculous. Geog- 
raphy, the dryest subject of all in our 
schools, how could you expect a mem- 
bership of 10,000 in the United States 
alone ! 
As I said, in the beginning, we found 
it necessary to get the proper man, but 
fortunately we found him. A young 
man who had made a very brilliant rec- 
ord at Amherst College was engaged as 
assistant editor of the magazine to stir 
up these new ideas, and to put new life 
into the scientific journal. But the So- 
ciety did not have the money to pay his 
salary ; that had to be raised by voluntary 
contributions from interested members. 
And so Mr. Gilbert H. Grosvenor com- 
menced his work in 1899. He speedily 
captured the Society — and incidentally 
he captured one of my daughters. 
Mr. Grosvenor later became Editor 
and then Director of the work of the 
Society. We have been very fortunate 
in securing his services, and with the 
intelligent action of an unusually fine 
Board of Managers, and the cordial 
support of the members of the Society, 
the success of the Society has been se- 
cured. We have increased to 107,000 
members and we are still on the upgrade. 
There is no reason to suppose that we 
are going to stop growing. 
THU PRESIJN'T CONDITION OF THE; SOCIETY 
Our magazine has become the greatest 
educational journal of the world. It 
goes to thousands of schools. Its circu- 
lation is greater than that of the Cen- 
tury Magazine, Harper's Magazine, or 
Scribner's ; it is as large as that of 
World's Work, Revieiv of Reviezvs, or 
The Outlook, and our outlook is as good. 
There is no reason why the circulation 
of our magazine should not increase, and 
there is no reason why the National Geo- 
graphic Society should not be placed in 
the possession of an endowment fund 
for geographic research, of its own mak- 
ing, many times that w^hich it now pos- 
sesses. 
Progress in securing ways and means 
has been accompanied by difficulties in 
other directions. So far as scientific 
discussion is concerned, the Society has 
been swamped by its own success. In 
the old days we had a small scientific 
society that would meet at the Cosmos 
Club for the purpose of carrying on 
technical discussions. Now we cannot 
do that. We cannot even meet in our 
own beautiful home on Sixteenth Street 
for this purpose, for we have grown too 
large. Who can discuss questions in the 
presence of one or two thousand people ? 
Even our most technical lectures were 
attended by too many persons to be ac- 
commodated in our own hall at the Hub- 
bard Memorial Building. Even the 
largest lecture hall in Washington has 
been found insufficient to receive the 
large audiences that crowd to our lec- 
tures. 
We tried the experiment this year of 
having each lecture repeated, once in 
the afternoon and again in the evening, 
and to our surprise the hall is crowded 
upon both occasions. The question of 
how to revive scientific discussions has 
been a perplexing matter for the Board 
of Managers. 
It has been proposed on various oc- 
casions to elect Fellows to the Society, 
and then have meetings of those Fel- 
lows for technical discussions. There 
has been considerable feeling, however, 
against a class distinction of this kind, 
which is all very well in a monarchical 
country, where aristocratic distinctions 
