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SCIENCE 



[Vol. LVI, No. 1443 



ably the great medical library of the Surgeon 

 General's Office in Washington. We have 

 developed library technique and library service 

 far beyond those of Eui'ope. But we have not 

 developed to the point where the historic sense 

 is necessarily fostered and the historic instinct 

 adequately satisfied. That will come with time. 

 Meantime we may perhaps expect that instruc- 

 tion will take cognizance of this changed situa- 

 tion and will by its pressure aid to improve 

 further the resources in the way of books. 



For, of course, instruction in historic method 

 and in the use of books as tools is utterly im- 

 possible without really good libraries. It is 

 folly to expect students — even advanced stu- 

 dents of high promise — to acquire a proper 

 attitude toward their predecessors and their 

 contemporaries without the publications of 

 both at hand in full numbers. It is useless — 

 or nearly so — to teach exact methods of ascer- 

 taining the present state of knowledge about 

 any particular problem, when you know it is 

 being worked on in New Zealand and South 

 Africa — and your library lacks the New Zea- 

 land and South African transactions and jour- 

 nals. I need not dwell on this painful fact. 

 You know more about it than I do. I suggest, 

 therefore, that the production of truly strong 

 men in your various lines of study depends to 

 a very considerable degree on a sufficient pro- 

 vision of books in our libraries here on this 

 campus. That provision depends on many 

 factors — of which money is by no means the 

 only one, as I hope to show you in the course 

 of these remarks. 



For the publication of the results of ob- 

 servation in the field of science has taken many 

 (and frequently strange) forms. We ordinar- 

 ily think of books as just books — ^perhaps un- 

 consciously influenced by the manufacture or 

 the perusal of text-books. Ordinary mono- 

 graphs of the text-book type do, it is true, 

 make the staple contents of book-sellers' stocks 

 and ordinary librarj' shelves. But they are 

 perhaps the least important element in the com- 

 plicated record of science. They are too gen- 

 erally compilations — not the results of original 

 research. And their tendency to accumulate on 

 those very shelves has perhaps had no 

 small part in that neglect of the historic aspect 

 of scientific inquiry to which allusion has just 



been made. The large and imposing mono- 

 graph is the exception. True, it generally re- 

 mains valuable and "weU-spoken-of" long 

 after the smaller books have passed to the 

 limbo of things with a "merely historical" 

 interest. Moreover, the hugh monographs 

 which have appeared in some scientific fields — 

 such things as Audubon's Birds of North 

 America, for example, or the monumental pub- 

 lications of von Humboldt — have been so costly 

 that save to a favored few they have been 

 merely names and names alone. I am inclined 

 to consider this costliness in relation to our 

 American libraries (until a recent date) a very 

 real factor in the neglect of the older literature. 

 It has simply cost too muoh to be known by 

 the average student. 



Perhaps the most extremely particularized 

 form of monograph is the doctoral thesis. 

 Most folk whom I have met have lost interest 

 in theses within a few years after their own 

 have been promptly forgotten by their col- 

 leagues. It is hard to get any money for a lot 

 of dissertations — particularly for the thin 

 German products. The more extended French 

 dissertations usually masquerade as real books. 

 But historically theses for the doctorate have a 

 great value — particularly those printed before 

 1800. Few people recall the pleasing habit of 

 the earlier centuries which practically com- 

 pelled the candidate respondens to pay for the 

 publication of the work of his presses under the 

 guise of a doctoral dissertation. A few years 

 since a committee on botanical nomenclature — 

 or rather, members of it resident in Washing- 

 ton — ^began to torment me for the dissertations 

 of the pupils of Linnaeus, which, they averred, 

 contained some of the great master's best work. 

 It was an interesting quest which became ex- 

 citing when I discovered a bundle of these 

 much desired little Upsala dissertations care- 

 fully tied up and labeled among a group of 

 several thousand Smithsonian exchanges from 

 Sweden. By the liberal use of the photostat, 

 reproducing copies from the Harvard Library 

 and the Torrey Botanical Club the series was 

 made, I believe, complete, and the committee 

 supplied with those original descriptions so es- 

 sential in determining nomenclature. 



One of the extremely important groups 

 which has been too often denied our budding 



