Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/309

Address by Lord Du/erin. 297 Everything that has been said or written upon the matter from the remotest ages to the present day is brought as com- modiously within his reach as the keys of a piano meet the finger tips of a young lady. Nor does your intervention stop here. Not only do you keep watch and ward over our citadels of learning, you also have concerned yourselves and this perhaps is the most useful of all your achievements with the distribution of books and the dissemination of their contents amongst the population at large through the powerful stimulus you have applied to the establishment of free and public libraries from one end of the country to the other. As a collateral con- sequence, you have created a new and now well-recognised pro- fession namely, that of the public librarian a profession most honourable in its nature, most useful in its functions, which embraces in its ranks gentlemen of the highest attainments, and which is especially distinguished by the promptitude and courtesy with which it assists its clients along the multifarious lines of research they may be respectively following. Gentlemen, I only wish that I could think that I were at all worthy to sound the praises of your Association. But, although a bibliophile, which is the polite term for a bibliomaniac, like most of my tribe, I am not an erudite person. But, indeed, in these days who can lay claim to such an appellation ? Formerly there were universal scholars who knew everything that is to say, the sum of human knowledge was so restricted that it was possible for an industrious man in a long life to range through its utmost limits ; but the " pond " of sixteenth-century learning has now become an ocean, as boundless as it is unfathomable. The distinction, consequently, between the ignorant and the well-instructed man has grown more benign ; for it has become merely a question of degree between our respective ignorances. The walking encyclopaedias of former times have disappeared. Every branch of human endeavour and research is getting more and more specialised. Even professions have become fissiparous, in France almost every organ of the body has its own physicians. In short, the experts have tumbled omniscience from his throne. But on that very account it is the more necessary that we should have the means of knowing, through your intervention, where information in regard to any particular subject is to be found. Though we cannot sail over every sea or visit every shore, you provide us with the charts which facilitate our navigation, and give us at least a notion of the general configuration of the world of letters.