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es of the public service, or are confided to the sordid ma- 

 nagement of contractors and speculators. This defect 

 will only disappear where such projects can be primari- 

 ly discussed and arranged in an association purely sci- 

 entific, with whose deliberations pecuniary or party con- 

 It is also upon the libraries of such societies, that we 

 must chiefly depend for the more rare and valuable works, 

 not only of the past but the present time. And this, to 

 us, is of more consequence, inasmuch as our opportuni- 

 ties of procuring relics of primitive learning, become 

 every day more and more unfrequent, and the risk of 

 their being lost in private libraries is always very great. 

 I do not mean to vindicate or recommend the vocation 

 of the mere bibliopole, who estimates the value of his 

 collections by their binding, their date or the width of 

 their margins— though even in this regard, as settling 

 eras m typography, and exhibiting the gradual improve- 

 ment of the art, such varieties are not without their use. 

 But in a more extended sense, there are productions of 

 the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which must always 

 be of interest, and which for certainty of arrangement, 

 and purity of diction, have not since been equalled. The 

 works of Copernicus, of Kepler, of Galileo, of Descartes, 

 of Malebranche, of Haller, of Pascal and Montaigne, 

 are rarely to be met with in this country now, and yet 

 there are few who have followed them in their respective 

 departments who have equalled them either in solidity or 

 effect. It was from the perusal of writings of this class 

 that Hume and Smith and Playfair and Stewart and Reid, 

 drew the pabula of learning and habits of investigation 

 which have rendered them celebrated. There seems al- 

 ways m literature and in science, to be a connection be- 

 tween the great of one age and the great of the next. The 

 sceptres of men of genius are never barren or given to a 

 hand unlineal, as the poet's disappointed king complains. 

 Shakespeare gleaned much of the legendary lore of which 

 the ground^work of his happiest conceptions was form- 



