TWENTY-NINTH CONGRESS, 1845-47. 417 



equal in extent to that of Gottingen ? More than seventy 

 years. In some seventy years, then, in three score years 

 and ten, when you sir, and I, and all who hear my voice, 

 and all the present actors in this busy world shall be num- 

 bered with the dead, we may hope, that free, enlightened 

 America, by the too sparing use of the generous bounty 

 of a stranger, will possess a collection of the recorded work- 

 ings of the human mind, not inferior to that enjoyed by a 

 single school in the miniature kingdom of Hanover ! And 

 what provision is made for the increase of books meanwhile ? 

 Look at the activity of the presses of London and Paris — at 

 the vastly prolific literature of Germany — at the increasing 

 production of our own country — to omit the smaller but still 

 valuable contributions to the store of human know^ledge in 

 the languages of other countries, and you will perceive that 

 this appropriation, so far from being extravagantly large, 

 will scarcely even suffice for keeping up with the current 

 literature of the day. Gottingen meantime will go on. 

 Her 300,000 volumes will increase in seventy years to half 

 a million, and we shall still lag 200,000 volumes behind. 



The utility of great libraries has been questioned, and it 

 has been confidently asserted, that all truly valuable knowl- 

 edge is comprised in a comparatively small number of vol- 

 umes. It is said that the vast collections of the Vatican, 

 of Paris, of Munich, and of Copenhagen are, in a great 

 measure, composed of works originally worthless, or now 

 obsolete, or superseded by new editions, or surpassed by 

 later treatises. That there is some foundation for this 

 opinion, I shall not deny ; but after every deduction is made 

 upon these accounts, there will still remain in any of these 

 libraries a great number of works which, having originally 

 had intrinsic worth, have yet their permanent value. Be- 

 cause a newer, or better, or truer book, upon a given sub- 

 ject, now exists, it does not necessarily follow that the older 

 and inferior is to be rejected. It may contain important 

 truths or interesting views that later, and, upon the whole, 

 better authors have overlooked — it may embody curious 

 anecdotes of forgotten times — it may be valuable as an illus- 

 tration of the history of opinion, or as a model of composi- 

 tion ; or if of great antiquity, it may possess much interest 

 as a specimen of early typography. 



Again, because any one individual, even the most learned 

 cannot, in this short life, exhaust all art, because he can 

 thoroughly master but a few hundred volumes, read, or even 

 have occasion to consult, but a few thousands, we are not 

 therefore authorized to conclude that all beyond these are 

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