atic
art; physicians looking up biographies of their profession or the history
of epidemics; students of heraldry after coats of arms; inventors
searching the specifications and drawings of patents; historical students
pursuing some special field in American or foreign annals; scientists
verifying facts or citations by original authorities; searchers tracing
personal residences or deaths in old directories or newspapers; querists
seeking for the words of some half-remembered passage in poetry or prose,
or the original author of one of the myriad proverbs which have no
father; architects or builders of houses comparing hundreds of designs
and models; teachers perusing works on education or comparing text-books
new or old; readers absorbing the great poems of the world; writers in
pursuit of new or curious themes among books of antiquities or folk-lore;
students of all the questions of finance and economic science;
naturalists seeking to trace through many volumes descriptions of
species; pursuers of military or naval history or science; enthusiasts
venturing into the occult domains of spiritualism or thaumaturgy;
explorers of voyages and travels in every region of the globe; fair
readers, with dreamy eyes, devouring the last psychological novel;
devotees of musical art perusing the lives or the scores of great
composers; college and high-school students intent upon "booking up" on
themes of study or composition or debate; and a host of other seekers
after suggestion or information in a library of encyclopedic range.

CHAPTER 15.

THE HISTORY OF LIBRARIES.

The Library, from very early times, has enlisted the enthusiasm of the
learned, and the encomiums of the wise. The actual origin of the earliest
collection of books (or rather of manuscripts) is lost in the mists of
remote antiquity. Notwithstanding professed descriptions of several
libraries found in Aulus Gellius, Athenaeus, and others, who wrote
centuries after the alleged collections were made, we lack the convincing
evidence of eye-witnesses and contemporaries. But so far as critical
research has run, the earliest monuments of man which approached
collections of written records are found not in Europe, but in Africa and
Asia.

That land of wonders, Egypt, abounds in hieroglyphic inscriptions, going
back, as is agreed by modern scholars, to the year 2000 before the
Christian era. A Papyrus manuscript, too, exists, which is assigned to
about 1600 B. C.