This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913.... CHAPTER VII AMERICAN SOCIETIES AND CLUBS1 It is not to be expected that the activities of learned societies in the United States should produce results to be compared in a large way with those secured by such societies in Great Britain. Although the work of American scholars upon English literature has for many years earned the respect of both British and Continental students, and although latterly American scholarship has frequently contributed to the publications of foreign text societies, isolation, special interests, the remoteness of manuscript material, have all provided an effective bar to extensive cooperative publication in this country. In addition, English literary antiquity is something in which America does not and can not directly share; an American society for the publication of English texts would be, therefore, for sentimental as well as geographical reasons, almost an impossibility. The history of publishing societies in the United States has shown that this fact is very generally appreciated; so we find-the really scholarly societies working along lines subordinate to or collateral with the labors of 1 Two facts have made it advisable to treat our American publishing societies less in detail than English organizations of a similar nature. In the first place, very few of them rank in importance, either historically or in the extent of their production, with the English societies; in the second place, the history and bibliography of American societies has been altogether very well done, in four works to which in most of this chapter, except the portion dealing with purely philosophical societies, I have been under continuous obligation. These are Growoll's American Book Clubs, 1897, Bowker's Publications of Societies, 1899, Griffin's Bibl...