labor to advancing its interests, you may facilitate the labors 

 of others, by adding to its funds. Allow me to mention a few 

 of the objects which might be accomplished with additional 

 means. Our library is deficient in many departments, which 

 might be economically filled up ; in ornithology, particularly, 

 the works of Wilson, Bonaparte and Audubon, should if pos- 

 sible be now secured, as the lapse of a few years may prevent 

 the possibihty of its ever being done. The works which we 

 require are not those which are to be found on the shelves of 

 every bookstore— the compends and digests of science; in 

 which the errors of one author are perpetuated by his succes- 

 sors, until it becomes at length a problem of no little difliculty 

 to ascertain what is the exact truth in regard to a given point. 

 But it is the originals which should here be found ; the store- 

 houses in which the knowledge and discoveries of each suc- 

 ceeding day have been laid up and preserved, and which are 

 no less instructive in showing what has been accomplished, 

 than in informing us what has been unsuccessful. The fact 

 may not be generally known, but is undoubtedly true, that of 

 the numerous inventions and discoveries which so abound 

 throughout our country, and on which we are apt to pride our- 

 selves, as proving the superior ingenuity of our countrymen 

 over the rest of the world, a large proportion are described and 

 figured in works belonging to our library, some of which go 

 back nearly two hundred years. These inventions have many 

 of them been tried and fallen into disuse, again to be invented 

 to pass through the same trial, and to encounter the same 

 neglect. A knowledge of what had been done and the result, 

 would in all probability in every such case have prevented the 

 waste of the money, time and ingenuity expended in the vain 

 attempt to bring to perfection what had been found insufficient, 

 and might have induced another and more profitable direction 

 to the same expenditure. These originals are the Transac- 

 tions of Scientific Societies, and the Journals of Science and 

 Art ; of the latter we possess an extensive and highly valua- 

 ble collection of what have been published in England, but of 

 those that have appeared upon the Continent of Europe, we 

 cannot boast a single specimen. Many of the volumes in our 



