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THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION AT DUBLIN. 
III. 
WITH THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION AT DUBLIN. 
By F. Long, L.R.C.P. 
Read 2 yth October, 1908. 
I attended the meeting of the British Association at Dublin 
in September as delegate from this Society. There were two 
meetings of the Conference of Delegates, at both of which 
1 was present. On September 3rd, the President, Professor 
H. A. Miers, F.R.S., gave an address “ On the Educational 
Opportunities of Local Scientific Societies,” in the course of 
which he said, as scientific literature had become more highly 
organised, it had fallen more and more into the hands of 
specialists, and that, from the amateur’s point of view, was 
to be regretted, for he could no longer get an adequate insight 
into the modern advances of science without either going 
through a special course of reading for which he had no time 
or attempting to master a treatise which he could hardly 
understand without some preliminary training. If it was 
difficult for the amateur to extract information from the text 
book or treatise how much more difficult was it for him to 
learn anything from the proceedings and meetings of these 
societies. If the language of text books was so technical that 
it was hard to understand, how much more unintelligible 
was the specialist jargon of a society, in which it often 
happened that a paper, though read in a meeting of specialists 
could only be followed by two or three of those present. He 
was not protesting against scientific language in itself, but he 
did feel that it was discouraging to the earnest student to find 
himself confronted by books he could not understand, or 
