THE LIBRARY PAST AND FUTURE 227 



Dame de Paris, " This has killed that " Ceci a tue cela and it will 

 have killed death with all her fatal instruments. 



But another and a more important aspect of scientific internation- 

 alism which will preserve the library of the future from becoming 

 a bazaar of social life, will be the importation of the most wholesome 

 fruits of ancient wisdom collected with wonderful learning by the 

 great scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the first 

 founders of libraries, men who attempted an inventory of human 

 knowledge. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 

 hitherto looked upon by experimental science with disdain, was 

 collected with laborious detail all the learning of past centuries, 

 that of the holy books of the oriental world, that which the fathers 

 of the Church, and after them the Arabs, and later on the Ency- 

 clopedists of the Middle Ages, and then the astrologists, and the 

 alchemists, and the natural philosophers, condensed into encyclo- 

 pedias, into chronicles, into treatises, into all that congeries of 

 writings which formed the libraries of the Middle Ages and of the 

 Renaissance, into that infinite number of printed books which still 

 fill the ancient and classical libraries of Europe with voluminous 

 folios and quartos. The desire of classifying and bringing into line 

 all human knowledge, of reading this immense amount of material 

 and gaining a thorough knowledge of it, armed those first solemn 

 scholars with patience, formed those legendary librarians who, like 

 Antonio Magliabecchi or Francesco Marucelli themselves, were living 

 libraries. The Latin anagram of the celebrated founder of the Floren- 

 tine library, Antonio Magliabecchi, is well known: " This, one 

 large library " Is unus bibliotheca magna; but it may be, and at 

 that time also could be, equally applied to the others. These 

 devourers of books were the first inventors and asserters of the 

 scientific importance of a card catalogue, because armed with 

 cards they passed days and nights in pressing from the old books 

 the juice of wisdom and of knowledge and in collecting and con- 

 densing it in their miscellany, in those vast bibliographical 

 collections compared with which the catalogue of the British 

 Museum is the work of a novice. They not only appraised the 

 known literature of their time, but they classified it; not by such 

 a classification as we make now, contenting ourselves with the title 

 of the book, but by an internal and perfect classification, analyz- 

 ing every page and keeping record of the volume, of the paragraph, 

 of the line. The skeleton of the encyclopedia, of the scientific 

 dictionary, which at the end of the eighteenth century underwent, 

 in France, a literary development, may be found within these biblio- 

 graphical collections now forgotten and banished to the highest 

 shelves of our libraries. Any one who has looked through and 

 studied one of these collections as I have done, has wondered at the 



