220 THE LIBRARY 



tablets by the pages of the stenographer; for drawing and paint- 

 ing we have substituted photography and three-color printing; 

 wireless telegraphy has taken the place of messages sent by post- 

 horses. 



And not content with these singular and wondrous modes of re- 

 producing graphically the thought and the word, we have found 

 another means of reproduction still more stupendous in the im- 

 mediateness of its action. Sound, the human voice, whose accents 

 have hitherto been lost, may now be preserved and repeated and 

 reproduced like other graphic signs of thought. When the grapho- 

 phone was first invented we little thought that the cylinders upon 

 which the vibrations of the voice had traced so slight and delicate an 

 impression would ever be reproduced as simply as, by electrotyp- 

 ing, we reproduce a page of movable characters. Neither have we 

 yet, or I am much mistaken, grasped the whole of the practical 

 utility which the graphophone may have in its further applications 

 and improvements. Up to the present time the graphophone has been 

 kept as a plaything in drawing-rooms or in bars, to reproduce the last 

 roulades of some well-known singer, the hangings of some military 

 band, or the pretended uproar of some stormy meeting. At the 

 present day the librarian would probably refuse to receive within his 

 library this faithful reproducer of the human voice and thought, 

 just as Frederic, Duke of Urbino, banished from his collection the 

 first examples of printed books. But without posing as a prophet 

 or the son of a prophet, we may surely assert that every library will, 

 before long, contain a hall in which the disks of the graphophone 

 may be heard (as already is the case at the Brera in Milan), and 

 shelves for the preservation of the disks, just as the libraries of 

 Assyria preserved the clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform charac- 

 ters. This is a new form of book, strange at first sight, but in 

 reality simply a return to ancient precedents, yet a return which 

 marks the upward movement of progress. 



An Italian Jesuit, Saverio Bettinelli, undertook toward the middle 

 of the eighteenth century to give laws to Italian writers. He pro- 

 duced certain letters which he assumed Virgil to have written from 

 the Elysian Fields to the Arcadia at Rome. In two of these twelve 

 tablets, which he put forth under the names of Homer, Pindar, 

 Anachreon, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto, 

 in the poetical meetings held in Elysium, he laid down as a rule: 

 " Let there be written in large letters on the doors of all public 

 libraries: ' You will be ignorant of almost everything which is 

 within these doors, or you will live three centuries to read the half 

 of it;' and a little further on: ' Let a new city be made whose 

 streets, squares, and houses shall contain only books. Let the man 

 who wishes to study go and live there for as long as may be needful; 





