420 CONGRESSIONAL PROCEEDINGS. 



few departments. In French history and literature, in civil 

 and international law, in the history and literature of class- 

 ical antiquity and of early typography, in theology, in 

 medicine, you will find it perhaps nearly satisfactory ; but 

 in the history and literature of all other nations, and in 

 almost every other field of inquiry but those I have men- 

 tioned, the learned scholar will miss the titles of many 

 more valuable works than he will find, while many highly 

 interesting and important chapters are almost entirely 

 blank. The Congressional Library does not probably con- 

 tain one-fourth even of the small proportion of Brunet's 

 list which I have described as of intrinsic and permanent 

 value. But are there not numerous branches of knowledge 

 well worthy a place in every great literary repository, and 

 which are yet wholly unrepresented in our alcoves ? Let 

 us devote a moment to some dry statistics concerning the 

 literature of continental Europe. The Bibliotheca Historica 

 Sueo-Gothica of Warmholtz, the last volume of which ap- 

 peared in 1817, enumerates no less than 10,000 works illus- 

 trative of the Idstory of Sweden alone ; and the thirty years 

 since have added greatly to the number. The Literatur- 

 Lexicon of Nyerup, published in 1820, gives the titles of 

 probably an equal number of works belonging to the liter- 

 ature of the countries subject to the Danish crown. Hol- 

 land, too, has noble historians, naturalists, poets, and 

 dramatists, and has produced many works of unsurpassed 

 value upon the history of commerce and navigation. The 

 list of Brunet contains not one in a hundred of the standard 

 authors of these several countries ; and the Library of Con- 

 gress, as far as I remember, does not possess a volume in 

 the language of either of them. Again, consider the vast 

 extent and surpassing value of the literature of Germany. 

 Of the 3,000,000 different volumes of printed books sup- 

 posed to exist, it is computed that more than one-third are 

 in the German language. The learning of Germany em- 

 braces every field of human inquiry, and the efforts of her 

 scholars have done more to extend the bounds of modern 

 knowledge than the united labors of the rest of the Chris- 

 tian world. Every scholar familiar with her literature — let 

 me not say familiar, for life is too short for any man to 

 count its boundless treasures — but cver}^ enlightened stu- 

 dent who has but dipped into it, will readily confess its 

 infinite superiority to any other, I might almost say to all 

 other literatures. It has been aflirmed, that more than 

 one-half of our population is of recent German origin, and 

 German is the vernacular tongue of extensive districts of 



