American College Libraries [pp. 714-723]

A31EPtICAN COLLEGE LIBR.kRIES.
useless or unattractive. This is manifested by the slender at-.
tendance of borrowers when the library is open, by the proportion of those who enter and take nothing away, and by the
small ratio of the loans in a year, or even in a college generation,
to the whole mass of the library. By all these indications it
appears that our college libraries are of little use to the students,
much as they need and wish for help. It is a misnomer to call
such a collection a library. The disappointment it produces is
suited to discourage and disgust the inquirer. It is a mockery
of curiosity and research. Students are entitled to complain
that the books they find in such libraries are inferior to the
very text-books they are using, instead of conducting to higher
levels of science. They find themselves everywhere met by walls
and ditches, forbidding advance in the directions indicated in
the lecture-room, or the manual of the class. In justice it must
be said of those who resort to college libraries, that they are
truly in earnest; the books they borrow are of a superior sort,
intended for study, and not for recreation. Oftentimes all the
scanty stock of good books pertaining to a subject prescribed to
a class, or a society, will be seized by the first corners; the rest
can only appeal to the courtesy of the fortunate, or wait till perhaps the hour of interest, or of distinction, has gone by. Considering the procession ot alert and ambitious minds yearly
passing through our colleges, and that the necessities arising
from occasion and from character are continulily changing, the
supply of books should be large, varied, and often recruitedo
Properly regarded, a library is a dictionary, in which all words
should be inserted, certainly the newest, that each may be found
as occasion requires. We know what to think of him who has no
dictionary, or who never opens it, or who is content with a scanty
manual. He is, and must remain, in a rank like that of the barbarous tribes or stolid peasants, whose whole dialect consists of
a few hundred words. How differently we think of him who
owns and continually consults lexicons of all languages, dictionaries of all sciences, encyelopedias of the largest capacity.
Such is the apparatus found in the reading-room of the British
Museum; found also in part in every great newspaper office-one
of the best universities in the world. It may not be wise indeed,
for a young man to "take all knowledge for his province," since
no mind can contain all that is known by all. But any person
may at some time have occasion for any variety of knowledge;
716
[Oct.