[211] ' 24 



The party politics of the day, on which men diflfer so widely and so 

 warmly, should not, your committee think, enter among the subjects 

 treated of in any lecture or publication put forth under the sanction of the 

 institution. And they would deeply regret to see party tests and party 

 wranglings obtrude themselves on the neutral ground of science and 

 education ; jeoparding, as such intrusion surely would, the tranquillity of 

 the institution, disturbing the even tenor of its action, perhaps assaulting 

 its welfare, certainly contracting the sphere of its usefulness. 



Your committee think it important that the institution, at the time it is 

 first opened, should have already in its hbrary a collection of such valu- 

 able works of reference as, in the prosecution of its plan, may be' re- 

 quired. In order to attain that object, your committee recommend that, 

 for the present, twenty thousand dollars be set aside for the purchase of 

 books and filling up of the library. 



An additional reason which has induced your committee to recommend, 

 out of the accrued interest, so large an appropriation at the outset, is, that 

 large annual appropriations from the accruing interest^ after the institution 

 is under way, are thereby rendered the less necessary. 



In proposing that, in the building about to be erected, there should be 

 provided library room sufficient to receive a hundred thousand volumxcs, 

 your committee yielded rather to what seemed a fair concession to the 

 spirit of the eighth section of our charter, than to their own deliberate 

 conviction that a library of more than half that size could, with the pres- 

 ent means of our institution, advantageously be purchased. 



But, without a vast accumulation of books in this metropolis, your 

 committee conceive that a librarian of the Smithsonian Institution may, 

 under a proper system, become a centre of literary and bibliographical 

 reference for our entire country. Your committee recommend that the 

 librarian be instructed to procure catalogues, written or printed, of all im- 

 portant public libraries in the United States ; and also, in proportion as 

 they can be obtained, printed catalogues of the principal libraries m 'Eu- 

 rope, and the more important works on bibliography. With these beside 

 him, he may be coilsufted by the scholar, the student, the author, the 

 historian, from every section of the Union, and will be prepared to in- 

 form them whether any works they may desire to examine are to be 

 found in the United States ; and if so, in what library ; or if in Europe 

 only, in what country of Europe they must be sought. 



Informed by these catalogues, it will be easy, and your committee think 

 desirable, for those who may be charffed with the selection of books 

 to make the Smithsonian library chiefly a supplemental one; to pur- 

 chase, for the most part, valuable works which are not to be found else- 

 where in the Union ; thus carrying out the principle to which your com- 

 mittee has already alluded as influencing all their recommendations — that 

 it is expedient, as far as may be, to occupy untenanted ground. 



Exceptions to this rule must here, of course, be made ; as in the case 

 of standard works of reference required for the immediate purposes of 

 the institution, and also of the very numerous works, many of cuj-rent 

 science, which, by a proper system of exchanges, we may procure with- 

 out purchase. In this latter connexion, the transactions and reports of 

 the Institution will obtain for us valuable returns. 



In following out this mode of collecting a library for the institution, 

 whenever a particular class of works of importance is found to be spe- 



