Part 25 (2/2)

Only thus can the span of human memory be set forth without a single forgetful flaw. If the like effort is made here to fill a like responsibility for the pa.s.sing moment to the future, it is possible that the Historical Society of another century will not find it necessary to pay $700 for an almanac which might once have been had for a penny, and yet how grievous the gap in the continuous and social memory of this our city if the solitary copy left of Bradford's Almanac, the first product of our press, had not found a secure resting-place.

A great library, therefore, does not merely transmit the memory of the past; it is daily providing memory for the future, safe preserved ”against the wreckful siege of battering days.” For the individual no worse hap can fall than loss of memory. All other powers may remain.

This lost, all are worthless. Stripped of memory, the soul has no future and no past, naught save an infructuose now. Nor less, the race. The destruction of the Alexandrian Library, whether with Abulfaraj we attribute it to the intelligent Moslem, or with Gibbon to the ignorant monk, was not the loss of so many books and parchments. It was the paralysis of a great lobe of human memory, fatal lesion had fallen on the localized organ of recollection in the brain of humanity. If we had the 200 plays of Aeschylus, the 160 of Sophocles, the last books of Livy, the missing annals of Tacitus, which this library held, the stature of these writers would not be increased. Like the greater peaks of every chain they already rise as they recede. It is only the foot-hill that needs bulk. These, and lost books like them, would fill for us the full measures of cla.s.sic memory. As library after library perished and book after book shared the fate of those fathered by Ptolemy, the wreck and loss of human memory went on. The ages that we call dark lacked not in men of action. Those ages of faith had their men of thought matching any before or after. They laid for us the foundations of a civil liberty more indestructible than that of Rome.

The piers of that great arch of law along which our rights daily travel in safety were built by them. Their architecture and their sculpture equals any. Their knowledge of the earth, as a whole, was immeasureably in advance of cla.s.sic conception. They furnished in Dante one of the two or three poets for all time, and in the Roman Church they gave the race a creation and conception of whose future it would be a rash man who ventured to say that it was destined to be less than its past, imperial as its history has been. These ages were dark, not from lack of light and of leading, but from lack of memory. The ages had lost touch of the elbow in their march through the dark defile of time. The Renaissance was less the revival of human knowledge than the recovery of human memory. Age was joined again to age in the unbroken sequence of continuous recollection, and Greece laid her hands to transmit an Apostolic succession of memory on the bowed and studious head of the modern world.

To play its part in transmitting and preserving human memory this library is tonight opened and dedicated. Our Library Committee, and you, sir, its head, who have shown us that whole libraries of comment may be condensed into a volume by your magic alembic, providing for criticism a new instrument of precision akin to the measurements and the a.n.a.lysis of the exact science--you, sir, in the loving care you have given this building, have not been providing a retreat for scholars; you have built and fas.h.i.+oned here another refuge and stronghold, fortified

”Against confounding Age's cruel knife That he shall never cut from memory.”

The architect of this building has not wrought in mere brick and stone; he has added to those shrines and centres of human memory to which its treasures gravitate for their security and convenience. This university, in receiving this building from its Finance Committee, which has raised its cost, and whose head first suggested its erection, is placed in a position where it can discharge not only the first duty of a university, to which it has always been true, of thinking for the community, but the second, which is like unto it, of remembering for society.

COLLECTION OF INFORMATION

One of the functions of the modern library is that of a huge cyclopedia, kept continually up to date by the acquisition of new material--books, periodicals, prints, pamphlets, clippings, publicity matter and ma.n.u.scripts. It is the cyclopedia on cards long advocated by Dr. Dewey, except that the cards are in its catalogue and do not contain the information directly but serve only as keys to it. In this kind of service the library is for the moment getting away from books and nearer to the worker, whether at home, in school or laboratory, or in commerce and industry.

LIBRARIES AS BUREAUS OF INFORMATION

Early material on this ancient function of libraries, so widely extended and developed of late, is hard to find. Only two papers are given here. The first, by Samuel S. Green, is part of an address delivered at the dedication of the Haston Free Public Library Building in North Brookfield, Ma.s.s., printed in _The Library Journal_ for July, 1896. A sketch of Mr. Green appears in Vol. I. of this series.

The ideal library is one which invites everybody who has a question to ask, which books contain answers to, to come to the library and put his question, with the a.s.surance that he will be kindly received, his question sympathetically considered, and every effort made to find the answer desired.

I cannot better ill.u.s.trate what I mean by saying that libraries should be bureaus of information than by giving instances of inquiries recently made in the library under my charge and explaining how those inquiries were met. I will select questions which were answered by sending out of town for books, and thus ill.u.s.trate in addition the fact that libraries administered on advanced principles help one another.

A man came to me not long since and asked by what means he could dissolve a certain gum which he mentioned. I had the United States Dispensatory brought. The man did not find the answer wished for in that work, but did find a reference to a volume of the _Pharmaceutical Journal_. We did not have a set of that periodical; so I said that I would send away to borrow the desired volume. I sent to the librarian of the medical library in Boylston place, Boston, for it. He sent it to me immediately by express. That volume contained some of the information desired by the inquirer, but not all that he wanted. There was another volume of the same periodical which he thought would contain the facts which he was in search of. I sent for that, promising to return both volumes at once. The second volume was immediately received. That contained just what was wanted.

By doing work like this a librarian may do much to add to the prosperity of the industries of a town.

Another man came to me to inquire whether we had a catalog of a certain southern society which purported to do hospital work.

I found that we had no catalog of the society named. It appeared that the applicant for information had been asked to contract to do $4000 worth of work for a society of the name mentioned and wished to learn something about its standing. I told him that if I were in his place I should write to a gentleman in Was.h.i.+ngton, whose name I gave him, who knows all about medical inst.i.tutions and hospitals throughout the country, to ask him about the society; I offered to write, myself, as the applicant felt timid about writing.

I did write and soon had the answer that the correspondent would advise the Worcester man to be very cautious about entering into a contract, for he knew nothing about the existence of such a society. I hope that I helped to save a Worcester business man from loss on this occasion.

Again, a boy who came into Worcester to school called at the library to ask me what I could tell his brother about a school for instruction in tanning leather in Freiberg, Saxony. Did it receive Americans? what was the cost of attending its sessions? what was its curriculum? etc., were questions asked.

I had no pamphlet to give the required information, but suggested that the Commissioner of Education at Was.h.i.+ngton be written to, to find out what information could be found in the library of his office. I found that it would be necessary for me to write the letter; so I wrote it.

Soon the answer came giving the information desired and stating the address of the school. The answer was pa.s.sed over to the applicant, with the suggestion that if further information were desired he should write to the officers of the school.

I remember doing much to start in her studies a resident of Worcester who has since become a distinguished Russian scholar, by helping her to get a Russian-German dictionary from abroad and by borrowing Russian books for her to read from Harvard College Library.

Three students of the Chinese language have received a.s.sistance at my library, one a missionary at home on leave, the other two students under the late Chinese professor of Harvard University, from dictionaries and other books borrowed for their use.

I have had occasion to hunt up books in the language of the Exquimaux for the use of an investigator in Worcester. I could not find the books in the libraries of Harvard University or Columbia College, and tried the libraries of other centres of learning without success, when I remembered that Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, the well-known Indian scholar and historical student, had brought together a fine collection of philological works in the Watkinson Library at Hartford, Connecticut.

The librarian of that library wrote me after a few days, saying that he had the books and would send them at once. He apologized for not despatching them before, saying that the library did not allow books to be taken out. He had waited to consult the president. The president had said that they must set aside the rule if Mr. Green and the library in Worcester wanted the books, for it was evident that they were needed for some important purpose. We got the books and they were used in the preparation of a learned paper.

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