altered this
state of things that thermometers are now made in factories, are owned
by all classes, and applied to the commonest uses. The thermometers
hanging on our walls no longer indicate familiarity with science, but
merely that a new tool has been added to household appliances. So in
book-making. The art which once served chiefly to record discoveries in
knowledge, conduct controversies in polemics, philosophy, and politics,
and for other grave and important purposes now adds to these a multitude
of common uses. A library may contain scores and even hundreds of
volumes, and yet have nothing but those books which have served in the
education and amusement of the children in an ordinary family. Or it may
be the result of a chance aggregation of "railway literature," bought to
relieve the tediousness of travel. Or it may consist, as is sometimes
the case, of the small and precious collections in frontier log huts, of
the gratuitous contributions of the patent medicine vender, the
plough-maker, and the lightning-rod man, mingled with the dear-bought
subscription books of the wandering peddler! Books are so common that
the possession of them is no longer an indication of the intellectual
tendency of their possessors.

With libraries open to the public the case is different. Their condition
affords one standard by which the character and tastes of the people may
be measured.

The United States are considered to be far behind foreign countries in
their book collections. We have nothing to compare with Dresden, Berlin,
and Paris, with their 500,000, 700,000, and 2,000,000 volumes. We do not
reach the wealth of even such second-rate places as Wolfenbuettel,
Breslau, and Goettingen, if their collections are correctly reported at
300,000, 340,000, and 400,000 volumes. And yet each year witnesses the
purchase of more than 400,000 volumes for our public libraries, taken
collectively, a number that is larger than any one collection in this
country! The permanent fund of our libraries, so far as known, amounts
to $6,105,581 and their annual income to $1,398,756. These figures do
not, in fact, represent anything like the truth, for not half the
libraries reported their permanent fund, or their yearly purchases, and
only one-quarter reported their yearly income. About one-fifth of the
whole number (769 exactly) report their expenditures for new books at
$562,407, and in 742 libraries the use of books amounts to 8,879,869
volumes