A Librarian's Work. 333 



pleted?" are questions revealing such transcen- 

 dent misapprehension of the case that little but 

 further mystification can be got from the mere 

 answer, " We are always making a catalogue, and 

 it will never be finished." The " doctrine of spe- 

 cial creations," indeed, does not work any better 

 in the bibliographical than in the zoological world. 

 A catalogue, in the modern sense of the term, is 

 not something that is " made " all at once, to last 

 until the time has come for it to be superseded by 

 a new edition, but it is something that " grows," 

 by slow increments, and supersedes itself only 

 through gradual evolution from a lower degree of 

 fulness and definiteness into a higher one. It is 

 perhaps worth while to give some general explana- 

 tion of this process of catalogue-making, thus an- 

 swering once for all the question as to what may 

 be a librarian's work. There is no better way to 

 begin than to describe, in the case of our own li- 

 brary, the career of a book from the time of its 

 delivery by the expressman to the time when it 

 is ready for public use. 



New American books, whether bought or pre- 

 sented, generally come along in driblets, two or 

 three at a time, throughout the year ; large boxes 

 of pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides, trade-cata- 

 logues, and all manner of woful rubbish (the ref- 



