The effort was not without precedent. Scholarly production had been connected with earlier expositions, and the large gatherings of scholars at the Paris Exposition were still in vivid memory. A large number of scientific congresses of specialists had been held there, and many hundred scholarly papers had been read. Yet the results hardly suggested the repetition of such an experiment. Every one felt too strongly that the outcome of such disconnected congresses of specialists is hardly comparable with the glorious showing which the arts and industries have made and were to make again. In every other department of the World's Fair the most careful preparation secured an harmonious effect. The scholarly meetings alone failed even to aim at harmony and unity. Not only did the congresses themselves stand apart without any inner relation, grouped together by calendar dates or by their alphabetical order from Anthropology to Zoölogy; but in every congress, again, the papers read and the manuscripts presented were disconnected pieces without any programme or correlation. Worse than that, they could not even be expected in their isolatedness to add anything which would not have been worked out and communicated to the world just as well without any congress. The speaker at such a meeting is asked to contribute anything he has at hand, and he accepts the invitation because he has by chance a completed paper or a research ready for publication. In the best case it would have appeared in the next number of the specialistic magazine, in not infrequent cases it has appeared already in the last number. Such a congress is then only an accident and does not itself serve the progress of knowledge.