TWENTY-NINTH CONGRESS, 1845-47. 419 



T)e repeated, for taking our proper place among the nations 

 of the earth, not merely as a political society, but as patrons 

 of knowledge 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 con- 

 tribute to^extend the means of the institution, that we can 

 hope to kindle a luminary, whose light shall encompass the 

 earth, and repay to . Europe the illumination we have bor- 

 rowed from her. 



The^ library of Gottingen, of which I have spoken, con- 

 tains 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 duplicates, 

 and few which the progress of science and literature have 

 rendered worthless. And yet, though upon the whole the 

 best existing library, it, in many departments, does not ap- 

 proach 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 defi- 

 ciencies and wants by comparing the contents of our Con- 

 gressional Library with the actual extent of existing litera- 

 ture. The Library of Congress contains 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 decree, 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 important 

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

 works of little intrinsic worth, or even adventitious interest : 

 but it is, perhaps, 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 



