Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/179

Scientific Text-Books. 167 easy solution of the question, so that to hand over our discarded books to them would be their profit and no loss to ourselves. But unfortunately our congeners in the colonies want to be on a level with us, and a good deal more too. It only needs a glance at some of their scientific and medical transactions and journals which find a place in our libraries, to see what quickened means of transit between and communication with the old country have done to advance the knowledge of our kinsmen at the Antipodes and elsewhere. Again we must face stern fact. There is no doubt that if a large majority of these books were to undergo a process of metem- psychosis by passing through the paper mill, and re-appear bearing on their pages the freshest discoveries, the scientific world would in general be no loser. But those who object to such wholesale extermination will doubtless concede that as soon as all the library shelves are full, the least valuable, or rather the most worthless, shall go the way I have just hinted, to make room for more useful successors. Another plan, already being adopted with some success in a few libraries, is to open a subscription at a bookseller's where there is a circulating library, for a limited number of volumes of the latest editions of text-books on loan, and to send for a supply of others in exchange as soon as they have been read through. This obviates the purchase of text-books which, for reasons stated earlier in this paper, must in a year or two become valueless. Such a plan solves the question to a certain extent, so far as the librarian is concerned, but it leaves the bookseller or proprietor of the subscription library in the very same plight as we ourselves would have been as regards the old editions, did we not adopt this method of ridding ourselves of it. But that is a question the bookseller can be safely left to settle, since he has the book-auctioneers and his own remainder sales to rely upon. Before closing this paper, to which I invite the discussion of those present, one cannot refrain from reflecting on the ennobling aspect of a scientific library. Though every shelf may contain books full of error and vain speculation, we cannot but acknow- ledge that the aim of the authors was a lofty one. For, after all, such a library is nothing less than the collection of the endeavours of hundreds or thousands of minds, the majority of bodies they tenanted now being dust and ashes, to give to the world what was earnestly and conscientiously believed, or hoped to be, the truth. ARCHIBALD CLARKE.