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spirit moved upon the people, and with the establishment of the Boston Public Library in 1852. "Public opinion in that city," says President D. C. Gilman, "demanded a library free, large, well catalogued, adapted at once to the public and to the scholar, dependent partly on the civic chest, partly upon the private purse, fitted to furnish entertainment and pleasure to the weary workman, and fitted to inspire and satisfy the most gifted writer. Later, C. A. Cutter wrote of the same library, "nowhere yet has the happy combination of private and public liberality made it possible to at once so thoroughly suffice for learned research even of the specialist, gratify cultivated curiosity, please the bibliomaniac and the dilettante, foster idle meditation, or stimulate vigorous thinking, while yet not neglecting to meet every want of the general reader, even the want of amusement and illusion, and, more than this, to attract to itself and to train adults who have never been in the habit of reading at all, and children who have not yet learned to read with profit." Here, in a nutshell, we have expressed the opinions of one of the ablest of university presidents and of one of the most expert of librarians on the scope and work of the first and one of the largest and best of public libraries.

Charles C. Jewett, father of the card catalogue, was its first librarian; Justin Winsor followed from 1868 till 1877, when he was called to the librarianship of Harvard College Library. The same success that attended his administration of the great public library followed his management of that of the great university library.

In 1850, Harvard, which for two centuries had been the largest library in the country, was still in the lead with only 70,000 volumes. The Astor Library had not been founded and the Library of Congress was little known. George Ticknor, a prime mover in the establishment of the Boston Public Library, had been for fifteen years a professor of modern languages and literature at Harvard. In a letter to Edward Everett, in 1851, he gave this expression of his ideal of the new institution: "I would establish a library which differs from all free libraries yet attempted; I mean which any popular books, tending to one in

moral and intellectual improvement, shall be furnished in such numbers of copies that many persons can be reading the same book at the same time; in short, that not only the best books of all sorts, but the pleasant literature of the day, shall be made accessible to the whole people when they most care for it; that is, when it is fresh and new. I would thus, by following the popular taste-unless it should demand something healthy reading. injurious-create a real appetite for healthy reading. This appetite, once formed, will take care of itself. It will, in a great majority of cases, demand better and better books."

Such was the high ideal of this enthusiastic pioneer in the free public library movement, a movement that has been and continues to be so widely endorsed as to prove that the Americans are indeed bookish people.

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facile princeps of librarians, with the The high ideal of the great Panizzi, change of a single word, may well be taken as that of the university library: versity] library so complete that a "I would have," said he, "a public [unischolar, however rich, will find it a more study, however well equipped." A uniconvenient working place than his own versity library with such an ideal might well merit the praise bestowed by President Gilman on one where bibliographical light, in an equable temperature, in the "treasures may be enjoyed with abundant atmosphere of repose, with learned and ready teachers near at hand, and with opportunities to enter those glorified cells of the cloister which we call the seminaries of knowledge"; a place where, to quote him again, "the promptness with which any book among a hundred thousand may be identified and summoned, as if it were touched by an electric wire, is an unfailing surprise to those who are looking for some long-lost friend, and an wont to spend hours in their own dens unfailing gratification to every busy student.'

But even with such an ideal, with a full collection of books well housed, the university may fail of its purpose. Carlyle said "the true university of these days is a collection of books," but this dictum is true only for the trained scholar, like Carlyle, who knows how to make use of them. The college man is in training