American College Libraries [pp. 714-723]

AMERICANI COLLEGE LIBRARIES.
recent grovwth. It is in scientific books of a high character that
the destitution is greatest, and it is probably because of this
high character, and the attendant cost. Often, the best are in
French or Germraan, and of commensurate price. These would
often be shunned by the student, from the difficulty of reading
them; but this should not deter the professors. Such books
are the means by which the instructor gains and keeps his fitness for his place; and the supply of such should be equal to his
wants. The reputation of the college, and the interest of the
student, demand it. But in the existing state of American
college libraries, the difficulty of procuring them amounts almost
to a prohibition, and often imposes on the ill-appointed professor
the cruel neccessity of paying with his own money for the instruments with which he is to effect his pupils' good. Teachers
and students are thus threatened with atrophy, and the generations which pass through college during the period of poverty,
may always retain the dwarf proportions which naturally proceed from insufficient aliment in youth.
In the public library of the city of Boston are preserved the
mnanuscripts of Nathaniel Bowditch, whose name was the pride
of mathematical science in youthful America. Among these, in
twenty-one volumes, quarto and folio, is his Common-place book,
consisting in great part of whole mathematical treatises, which
he was too poor to buy, and therefore copied out with his own
hand. But this was at the end of the last century and at the beginning of this. Is not America now too rich to let "' penury repress
the noble rage" of her scientific sons?
College libraries are often rich in books which students do not
want, and poor in books which students need. The library of
the College of New Jersey has the first three polyglots of the
Scriptures, twenty-four volumes folio, glorious monuments of
learning; but college students have no occasion for them. It
possesses the Annales Eccelesiastici of Baronius, in thirteen volumes folio; and the publications of the Record Commission of
Great Britain, eighty-four folios of crabbed, abbreviated, barbarous Latinity, coming down from the middle ages. In a cenfu-ry, probably they would not be consulted a hundred times.
Fifty years ago, in setting up an academy in AIaine, Martin
Chemnitz' ]ca,nea COCeil'ii trialehntii, was given to help edu cate frontier children. Oftentimes also, the literary and scientific
possessions of a library have become antiqu ted, and therefore
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