Hope this microphone works. If you have to listen to me I hope you can hear me. Once before at a gathering of a learned society, seeing an upright gadget before me, I talked with extreme care directly into it for half an hour, moving neither to the right nor to the left, only to find as I went down from the platform that it was a lamp.
1 The history of the MLA outlining its beginnings and growth has been admirably taken care of by its secretaries and presidents. Carleton Brown made “A Survey of the First Half-Century,” PMLA, xlviii (Supplement, 1933), 1409–22; P. W. Long printed “The Association in Review,” lxiv (March 1949, Supplement), 1–12; and W. R. Parker in “The MLA, 1883–1953,” lxviii (Sept. 1953, Supplement), 3–39, gave a full account of the foundation of the Association, the personnel of its first membership, and its development and expansion into our own period. The original records of the Association were not preserved and he supplied missing information after much research, even identifying the original members and following their careers. Most important perhaps of the timely innovations introduced by Secretary Parker was his foundation and directorship of the FL (Foreign Language) Program with its clearing house and communication activities and its incitement to constructive personal activities on the part of our members.