366 Darwinism and Other Essays. 



card-title is not to be found in the catalogue 

 proves nothing of itself, for very likely the card 

 may be " out " in the hands of some assistant. 

 Nothing is more common than for a professor to 

 order some well-known work in his own depart- 

 ment of study which has been in the library for 

 several years, and so long as the art of cataloguing 

 is as complicated as it now is such misunder- 

 standings cannot be altogether avoided. Very 

 often this is due to the variety of ways in which 

 one and the same book may be described, and 

 cannot be ascribed to any special cumbrousness or 

 complexity of our system. All this necessitates a 

 thorough scrutiny of every title that is ordered, 

 for to waste the library's money in buying dupli- 

 cates is a blunder of the first magnitude. Yet in 

 spite of the utmost vigilance, it is seldom that a 

 case of two or three hundred books arrives which 

 does not contain two or three duplicates. One 

 per cent, is perhaps not an extravagant allowance 

 to make for human perversity, in any of the af- 

 fairs of life in which the ideal standard is that of 

 complete intelligence and efficiency. 



The danger of buying a duplicate because a 

 card-title does not happen to be in its place is one 

 illustration of the practical inconvenience of card- 

 catalogues. The experience of the past fifty years 



