TWENTY-NINTH CONGRESS, 1845-1847. 379 



edge and the liberal arts. The treasures of our national wealth are, 

 perhaps, not at our command for this purpose; and it is only by the 

 discreet use of this bequest, and of the funds which private liberality 

 will assuredly contribute to extend the means of the Institution, that 

 we can hope to kindle a luminary whose light shall encompass the 

 earth, and to repay to Europe the illumination we have borrowed 

 from her. 



The library of Gottingen, of which I have spoken, contains six 

 times as many volumes as the largest American collections; it has been 

 accumulated within a comparatively short period scarcely a century 

 and, having been selected upon a fixed plan by the ablest scholars in 

 the world, it contains few books originally without merit, few dupli- 

 cates, and few which the progress of science and literature have ren- 

 dered worthless. And yet, though upon the whole the best existing 

 library, it, in many departments, does not approach to completeness, 

 and the scholars who resort to it are often obliged to seek elsewhere 

 sources of knowledge which Gottingen does not afford. 



We shall perhaps be best able to estimate our own deficiencies and 

 wants by comparing the contents of our Congressional Library with 

 the actual extent of existing literature. The Library of Congress con- 

 tains more than 40,000 volumes, in general valuable and well chosen, 

 with not many duplicates, not many books that one would altogether 

 reject. It is not composed, like too many of our public libraries, in 

 any considerable degree, of books which have been given, because the 

 proprietor found them too worthless to keep, but it has been almost 

 wholly purchased and selected from the best European sale catalogues, 

 and yet there is no one branch of liberal study, even among those of 

 greatest interest to ourselves, in which it is not miserably deficient. 



There is perhaps no better general catalogue of such books in the 

 various departments of learning, as are prized by collectors, than the 

 Table Methodique, in the last edition of Brunet's Manuel du Libraire. 

 Brunet enumerates more than 30,000 works, making in the whole 

 about 100,000 volumes, and professes to specify only the most impor- 

 tant and the rarest. The list contains, no doubt, very many works of 

 little intrinsic worth, or even of adventitious interest-, but it is, per- 

 haps, not too much to say that a library of the larger class ought to 

 possess at least 25,000 of the volumes it specifies. But this list is even 

 tolerably complete in but few departments. In French history and 

 literature, in civil and international law, in the history and literature 

 of classical antiquity and of early t}^pography, in theology, in medi- 

 cine, you will find it perhaps nearly satisfactory; but in the history 

 and literature of all other nations, and in almost every other field 

 of inquiry but those I have mentioned, the learned scholar will miss 

 the titles of many more valuable works than he will find, while 

 many highly interesting and important chapters are almost entirely 



