in a large public library to admit readers
to the shelves, without the company or the surveillance of an attendant.
And it is not alone the uncultivated reader who cannot be trusted; the
experience of librarians is almost uniform to the effect that literary
men, and special scholars, as well as the collectors of rare books, are
among those who watch the opportunity to purloin what they wish to save
themselves the cost of buying. Sometimes, you may find your most valuable
work on coins mutilated by the abstraction of a plate, carried off by
some student of numismatics. Sometimes, you may discover a fine picture
or portrait abstracted from a book by some lover of art or collector of
portraits. Again, you may be horrified by finding a whole sermon torn out
of a volume of theology by a theological student or even a clergyman.
All these things have happened, and are liable to happen again. No
library is safe that is not closely watched and guarded. In the Astor
library a literary man actually tore out sixty pages of the _Revue de
Paris_, and added to the theft the fraud of plagiarism, by translating
from the stolen leaves an article which he sold to Appleton's Journal as
an original production!

In this case, the culprit, though detected, could not be punished, the
law of New York requiring the posting in the library of the statute
prohibiting mutilation or other injury to the books, and this posting had
not been done. The law has since been amended, to make the penalties
absolute and unconditional.

In the Astor Library, over six hundred volumes were discovered to have
been mutilated, including art works, Patent office reports, magazines,
newspapers, and even encyclopaedias. The books stolen from that library
had been many, until several exposures and punishment of thieves inspired
a wholesome dread of a similar fate.

At a meeting of the American Library Association, one member inquired
whether there was any effectual way to prevent the abstraction of books.
He was answered by another librarian (from Cincinnati) who replied that
he knew of only one effectual method, and that was to keep a man standing
over each book with a club. Of course this was a humorous paradox, not to
be taken literally, but it points a moral.

Seriously, however, the evil may be greatly curtailed, (though we may be
hopeless of absolute prevention) by adopting the precautions already
referred to. In the Library of the British Museum, a great libra