November 22nd Nus 974 to 1313 Eng-Han November 25th Nos 1314 to 1650 Har - Let Friday Friday M133060 HE QUESTION OF CATALOGUING OUR BOOKS IS BEcoming a very serious one. For more than four hundred years the press has teemed, and of late steamed, with books. The dead past lives again in print in our public and private libraries, where to a great extent are garnered up records of laws, manners, customs, history, literature, science and artthe intellectual accumulations of ourselves and our predecessors. Here the past and present hold their school for the instruction of the future. A nation's books are her vouchers. Her libraries are her muniments. Her wealth of gold and silver, whether invested in commerce, or bonds, or banks is always working for her; but her stores of golden thoughts, in ventions, discoveries, and intellectual treasures, invested mainly in print and manuscript, are too often stored somewhere in limbo unregistered, where, though sleek and well preserved, they rather slumber than fructify. The half of them are not recorded, and the resting places of many are not known. New old books are daily brought to light. All the copies at present known of half the different works printed by England's five earliest printers may be counted on our fingers if not on our thumbs. In spite of the recent activity of collectors and librarians it is well known that a large proportion of all the books that came from the press of Caxton exists as far as we know at present in single copies only, many of which are imperfect. How many have been utterly lost no man can tell. Nay more, who can lay his hand readily on a single copy of all, or even a considerable part, of the printed ballads that were sent broadcast over the land so late as the year of the Crimean war? Books! to-day they are, to-morrow the half of them are not. The stillborn and infant mortality among them is greater far than the corresponding death-rate in Dr Farr's tables. Many pass away unrecorded and leave no trace of their existence. From the days of Hipparchus to the present time the stars have been catalogued, and to-day every bird, beast, fish, shell, insect, and living thing; yea every tree, shrub, flower, rock and gem, as they become known are scientifically, systematically and intelligently named, described and catalogued. In all these departments of human knowledge there is a well ascertained and generally acknowledged system which is dignified as a science. A man who can correctly describe in a dead language a live beetle, or a fish, or a humming bird is very properly deemed a philosopher, a man of science, becomes a fellow of learned societies with a respectable o P Q handle to his name, and may once a year spend a week with other severe philosophers in Scientific Associations. But as yet no such honour awaits the bibliographer, the cataloguer of our books, the registrar of our mental offspring. There is no acknowledged system of art or science to dignify and honour his labors. Bibliography as yet is a mere jackall, or packhorse, or some other patient beast of burden doomed to work for other arts and sciences, content with small emoluments for itself and smaller praise. This ought not so to be, and will not probably be so much longer. There will doubtless, as in every thing else in this rapid age, be a favorable change whenever the importance of the subject is fairly so brought home to our business and bosoms as to make it pay and become respectable. We are accustomed to boast that the literature of the English language is the richest in the world. It may be so, but just now this is probably mere national brag, inasmuch as we are unable to back our boast with even decent catalogues or schedules of it. Of the ephemeral literature of the past and the floating books of the present a large part was never booked. It was even worse in our fathers' day than now. Many are saved by drifting by mere chance into some snug harbour. Offer a thousand small English books of the present century to the British Museum, and full as it already is, the chances are that half of them will be found wanting in that world-renowned national repository where every human British book has the inalienable right of recorded citizenship. There are tolerably complete lists of our soldiers, ́our clergy, our lawyers and our criminals. Why not of all our books? Who shall say that this class contains more drones or trash than that? or why one list should be winnowed and another not? The fact is we have not the means, notwithstanding our honored and appreciated Herberts and Ameses, our Watts, our Lowndeses and Bohns, of taking stock of our national literature. We do not forget our Clarkes, our Dibdins, our Anglia Poeticas, our Grenvilles, our Lea Wilsons, our Hazlitts or our Lofties. Current trade lists there are indeed, good enough |