blow. The
free public library can neither be established nor maintained usefully
without their aid, but their methods--or want of method--must be
carefully guided to produce good results.

The sentiment that we ought to establish institutions for the diffusion
of knowledge is the expression of a real economic need and should be
directed and encouraged and not suppressed. Logic is a useful steering
apparatus, but a very poor motive power.

THE LIBRARY: A PLEA FOR ITS RECOGNITION

Delivered by Frederick M. Crunden before the Library Section
of the International Congress of Arts and Science, held in
connection with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St.
Louis in 1904, closes with a summary of the public library's
functions that remains measurably true to-day, although, of
course, it could now be somewhat expanded.

A sketch of Mr. Crunden appears in Vol. I.

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition is an epitome of the life and activity
of the world--from the naked Negrito to the grande dame with her
elaborate Paris costume, from the rude wigwam of the red Indian to the
World's Fair palace filled with the finest furniture, rugs and
tapestries, sculpture and painting, and decorations that the highest
taste and finest technique can produce--from the monotonous din of the
savage tom-tom to the uplifting and enthralling strains of a great
symphony orchestra--from fire by friction, the first step of man beyond
the beast, to the grand electric illumination that makes of these
grounds and buildings the most beautiful art-created spectacle that ever
met the human eye. And to all this magnificent appeal to the senses are
superadded the marvels of modern science and its applications--the
wonders of the telescope, the microscope and the spectroscope, the
telegraph, in its latest wireless extension, the electric motor and
electric light, the telephone and the phonograph, the Roentgen ray and
the new-found radium.

And now after this vision of wondrous beauty, this triumph of the grand
arts of architecture and sculpture and landscape--of all the arts, fine
and useful--has for six months enraptured the senses of people from all
quarters of the globe, the learned men of the world have gathered here
to set forth and discuss the fundamental principals that underlie the
sciences, their correlations and the methods of their application to the
arts of life--to summarize the progress of the past, to discus