ragment from every book
shines this Ancient of Days, who before Abraham was and after us shall
be. Who and what are we, creatures of a day, toilers of an hour, to be
measuring by our experience the metes and bounds in the manifestations
of his mighty memory. Rather let our labor be given to render complete
and to transmit unbroken our share in this great heritage by preserving
the universal printed record of the life about us. The librarian falling
far short of the honor and amplitude of his office, standing between the
living past and the slowly dying life of the present, now and then
apologizes for saving every empty volume, because none but prescient
omniscience can tell which of 10,000 titles will be demanded by some
solitary reader a century hence. How petty the plea, how narrow the
argument, how infinitesimal the claims of this distant reader who after
all may never appear! But how simple, how sufficient, how adequate
becomes the reason for the preservation of every volume when we remember
that it, too, is a part of this vast image of human memory seated by the
slow river of time, more vocal than that of Memnon, older and younger,
and with every fresh sunburst of genius breaking into fresh song!

In high reason has our own Historical Society gathered every volume
which fell in this State and city from the press of the last century.
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 passing 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