224 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LII. No. 1340 



of the most careful workers of my acquaint- 

 ance recently located, after much search, the 

 title of a somewhat obscure work on stomata, 

 only to find, shortly after, that the book was 

 plainly catalogued under the heading Stomata 

 in the library of the institution in which he 

 was at work. 



The work of the librarian is important to 

 the investigator not only in making the 

 results of previous researches available now, 

 but in the attempt to insure present results 

 being available in the future. If the results 

 of the investigations of to-day are anywhere 

 available to succeeding generations it will be 

 in the larger libraries where the publications 

 containing them are being carefully collected 

 and catalogued. We have heard much 

 recently about cooperation among investi- 

 gators, its desirability, its difficulty, and its 

 disadvantages, and the means by which its 

 undesirable features may be avoided and its 

 disadvantages and difficulties lessened. Might 

 not brief consideration well be given to 

 cooperation between the investigator and the 

 most important of his co-laborers, a cooper- 

 ation which can have neither difficulties nor 

 disadvantages ? 



Those of us who are much in the field, per- 

 haps, appreciate more keenly than those who 

 are always in touch with their homes the 

 special advantages of the public library. In 

 these days of closed bars and crowded hotels 

 the one place where the stranger is sure of a 

 welcome is the public library. And, speak- 

 ing seriously, the importance and influence in 

 small communities of libraries as well stocked 

 and well conducted as those of Poughkeepsie, 

 New York, and Riverside, California, for 

 example is hard to estimate. Now that Mr. 

 Carnegie has provided these institutions all 

 over the country with suitable buildings, in 

 his commendable effort to die poor, why 

 should not the investigator, who must die 

 poor anyway, look to their contents? 



The smaller public libraries need help espe- 

 cially in this particular. The almost over- 

 whelming demand on these libraries for fic- 

 tion, especially recent fiction, should not be 

 permitted to exclude scientific material from 



their shelves. If the results of our labors, or 

 the methods, or even the activities themselves, 

 are to be made known to the reading public, 

 as much of our literature as possible must be 

 made available in public libraries. Every 

 public library should have at least Science 

 and the Scientific Monthly. If you find a 

 library that lacks them, urge the authorities 

 to subscribe, and if they lack the funds, give 

 them your own set. 



The investigator has, moreover, an obliga- 

 tion to the college library, the library of the 

 college from which he graduated perhaps, or 

 the one nearest his home. Other alimani will 

 care for other interests, the pious for the 

 erection of a new chapel, the more worldly 

 minded for the gymnasium, but the library is 

 too often left to shift for itself, and provided 

 with insufficient funds. This applies partic- 

 ularly to the smaller colleges of course, but 

 it is indeed a rare university library to which 

 the average investigator can not add some 

 volume in the course of ten years' work, and 

 that volume will on the whole be much more 

 useful and safer in a good library than in a 

 private study or laboratory. 



From the standpoint of self-interest as well 

 as of common honesty, however, the first duty 

 of the investigator is to the reference li- 

 braries, whether general libraries like the 

 John Crerar Library and those of our leading 

 imiversities, or libraries covering special fields 

 such as the Lloyd Library or those connected 

 with our large botanic gardens. If an in- 

 vestigator accepts the hospitality and uses the 

 facilities of the Library of the Marine Bio- 

 logical Laboratory at Woods Hole, or that of 

 Stanford University, and one is made quite 

 at home in both without introduction, it seems 

 no more than fair that these libraries be sup- 

 plied in return with as complete a set as 

 possible of his own publications if they lie 

 within the field of interest of the library. I 

 am reliably informed that this practise is by 

 no means general. Comparatively few of the 

 investigators of my acquaintance take the 

 trouble to send reprints of their publications 

 even to the Library of Congress. 



That these papers are usually published in 



