August 25, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



207 



importance be produced in any field of knowl- 

 edge. 



By this time, I fear you may be saying to 

 yourselves that whatever the platitude of re- 

 search may mean as aj)plied to bibliography 

 the bibliographer is in truth indulging in 

 platitudes! No one need set up a man of 

 straw for the pleasure of knocking him over. 

 There is no point to my contention, if it be 

 true that students of the natural sciences in 

 America have rigorously employed both the his- 

 torical and the experimental method. The 

 great leaders have unquestionably done just 

 that. But how many great leaders have we 

 produced in America? May not one reason 

 for our surpassing excellence in the practical 

 arts and our rather scant array of great names 

 in pure science lie exactly in the absence of 

 the historical record of science from American 

 institutions in the past century? It is difficult, 

 perhaps one may say it is impossible, to get a 

 correct historical perspective without a really 

 good and strong library to furnish the means 

 of study. No amount of second-hand informa- 

 tion will ever take the place, for the real stu- 

 dent, of the original documents. This is just 

 as true in the pure and applied sciences as it 

 is in history, economics or letters. Imagine an 

 asti'onomer trying to carry on intelligent re- 

 search in the observational field alone, without 

 the great publications of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury at his hand for previous study and occa- 

 sional consultation. Yet that is precisely what 

 scores of astronomers have done in this land, 

 and are doing to-day. The example might be 

 multiplied ten-fold. Really good libraries of 

 scientific books are scarce enough in America 

 to-day. Before 1870 they did not exist, save 

 perhaps at Cambridge in Massachusetts. No 

 one of them is yet fully equipped to meet all 

 the reasonable demands of scientists for a 

 record of the progress of knowledge. I say 

 this from my own experience. For eight years 

 I labored — too often in vain — to serve the 

 scientists in the various bureaus in Washing- 

 ton with books they needed. My work was in 

 the third largest library in the world. This 

 fact is significant. May I enlarge upon it? 



America is not a nation alone — it is a con- 

 tinent. Distances are enormous. Because Mr. 

 Henry E. Huntington has in San Gabriel in 



California a very rare early English book on 

 American fishes or plants, it does not follow 

 that it is of much use to a Harvard student 

 who requires the exact language of the original 

 description of a particular species. The ex- 

 traordinary collection of early botanical works 

 in the library of Notre Dame University is not 

 easily helpful to the botanists of the Bureau 

 of Plant Industry. These are but two con- 

 crete examples of the physical size of this land. 

 You know what it means to journey to Wash- 

 ington in the hot weather of summer — yet you 

 must make the trip in vacation to consult some 

 volume found in America only in the Library 

 of Congress and too rare or too fragile to per- 

 mit its loan. The situation is quite different 

 in Europe. No university in the British Isles 

 is as far from the British Museum as Ann 

 Arbor is from New York or Washington. 

 Even from Aberystwyth or remoter Aberdeen 

 the trip is less in time consumed than from 

 here to Albany. No • French university pro- 

 fessor is so far in time from the Bibliotheque 

 Nationale as we from our national library, and 

 we (be it remembered) are much nearer than 

 our colleagues to the west and south. In Ger- 

 many the Prussian State Library and in Aus- 

 tria the great libraries at Vienna are relatively 

 near the universities. If one goes to London, 

 it is but eight hours to Paris. BetAveen the two 

 largest libraries in the world a scholar can 

 usually find all he needs in the way of books. 

 I need not point out the contrast in this coun- 

 try and in Canada. These distances from great 

 library centers have not been without influence 

 on American scholarship. 



In fact we may safely say that up to about 

 1900 there were very few strong scientific libra- 

 ries in America, libraries in which the record 

 of science could be traced with precision. There 

 has been an almost startling change since the 

 opening of this century. We have much yet 

 to do. We can overcome the obstacles of dis- 

 tance and youth only by further heroic efforts. 

 But we have most surely made progress. We 

 have now a round dozen libraries really strong 

 from an absolute standard. And they are 

 growing stronger every day. We have many 

 special libraries in various fields of science 

 which have been highly developed in their own 

 line — of these the most conspicuous is prob- 



