A Librarian's Work. 367 



has shown that on the whole such catalogues are 

 far better than the old ones which they have 

 superseded ; but they have their shortcomings, 

 nevertheless, and here we have incidentally hit 

 upon one of them. Besides this, a card-catalogue, 

 even when constructed with all the ingenuity 

 that is displayed in our own, is very much harder 

 to consult than a catalogue that is printed in a 

 volume. On a printed page you can glance at 

 twenty titles at once, whereas in a drawer of 

 cards you must plod through the titles one by one. 

 Moreover, a card-catalogue occupies an enormous 

 space. Professor Abbot's twin catalogue of au- 

 thors and subjects, begun fourteen years ago, is 

 now contained in three hundred and thirty -six 

 drawers occupying a case fifty- one feet in length ! 

 During the past six weeks some four thousand 

 cards have been added to it. What will its di- 

 mensions be a century hence, when our books will 

 probably have begun to be numbered by millions 

 instead of thousands? Gore Hall is to-day too 

 small to contain our books : will it then be large 

 enough to hold the catalogue? Suppose, again, 

 that our library were to be burned ; it is disheart- 

 ening to think of the quantity of bibliographical 

 work that would in such an event be forever ob- 

 literated. For we should remember that while a 



