380 CONGEESSIONAL PROCEEDINaS. 



])lank. The Congressional Library d(^es not probably contain 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 concern- 

 ing the literature of continental Europe. The Bibliotheca Historica 

 Sueo-Gothica of Warmholtz, the last volume of which appeared in 

 1817, enumerates no less than 10,000 works illustrative of the his- 

 tory 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 belong- 

 ing to the literature of the countries subject to the Danish Crown. 

 Holland, 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 Congress, 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 supposed to exist, it is computed 

 that more than one-third are in the German language. The learning 

 of Germany embraces every field of human inquiry, and the efforts of 

 her scholars have done more to extend the bounds of modern knowl- 

 edge than the united labors of the rest of the Christian 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 every 

 enlightened student who has but dipped into it, will readily confess its 

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

 tures. It has been affirmed that more than one-half of our population 

 is of recent German origin, and German is the vernacular tongue of 

 extensive districts of American soil. Yet the Library of Congress 

 contains not one hundred, probabl}^ not fifty, volumes in that noble 

 language. You have none of the numerous writers of the vast empire 

 of Russia, or of Poland; nothing of the curious literatures of Hungary 

 and Bohemia; only the commonest books in Italian and Spanish; not 

 a volume in the language of Portugal, rich as it is in various litera- 

 ture, and especially in the wild yet true romance of Oriental discovery 

 and conquest that comes down to us through the pages of learned De 

 Barros and quaint old Castanheda, ringing upon the ear and stirring 

 the blood like the sound of a far-off trumpet. In the boundless world, 

 too, of Oriental learning, of which our increasing commercial rela- 

 tions with the countries of the East render it highly desirable that 

 we should possess the means of acquiring a knowledge, you have noth- 

 ing to show but a few translations of the Bible, and perhaps some 



