SCIENTIFIC READING IN A PUBLIC LIBRARY. 525 



During this month the total home circulation of these branch 

 libraries was 131,700, and that of the sciences was 8,553, or 6.5 per 

 cent. The first thing that strikes one is that this is a very small 

 percentage. It is not so as compared with other libraries, as the 

 smaller table shows ; and of course it is impossible to say a priori what 

 amount of scientific literature a public library ought to circulate; but 

 taken in connection with other facts in the writer's experience as a 

 librarian, it is believed that these figures show a general lack of 

 public interest in science — the same lack of interest that has been 

 brought out of late by several writers who note the general want of 

 consideration for science and scientific men in this country as compared 

 with those of Europe. But while this smallness of our scientific read- 

 ing is doubtless symptomatic of something deeper, it is probable that in- 

 terest in science might be stimulated in the library itself. The librarian 

 has numerous effective ways of increasing the reading in a particular 

 class of literature, but none of them appears to have been generally 

 used in this case. Lists and bibliographies, in history, for instance, 

 are very much more numerous than in science, probably for the rea- 

 son that public librarians and also the teachers with whom they come 

 most in contact are generally more interested in the former subject 

 than in the latter. 



Scientific men themselves could doubtless do much to better matters, 

 and I am sure that those in charge of public libraries would welcome 

 suggestions from them regarding the character of their scientific books 

 and plans for making those books attractive to the public and stimulat- 

 ing interest in them. Men like Mr. Hodges, of Cincinnati, who is 

 both a librarian and a scientific man, are doing much toward putting 

 science on a better footing in our public circulating libraries, as his 

 paper read at the recent conference of the American Library Asso- 

 ciation shows. A glance at the numerical table shows that the public 

 interest in science is not even as great as the total figure would seem 

 to indicate. The largest circulation by far in any one of the thirty 

 subclasses represented is in 420 — English philology. But in this 

 are included many volumes of elementary language lessons, etc., which 

 are used in connection with school work, and these doubtless account 

 for the size of this figure. Next comes 370 — education, and although 

 it is interesting to see that books on this subject are so popular, their 

 popularity has little to do with a general appreciation of the im- 

 portance of scientific literature. 



The next largest circulation is in 590 — zoology. Here at last we 

 have a natural science. But among works on zoology are classed a 

 large number of popular animal stories, which probably make up a 

 considerable number of the 778 books in this subject read during 

 the month. 



