ially when assured of reaping reciprocal
benefit by the opportunity of freely perusing a great variety of choice
books, new and old, which they have never read. Sometimes, too, a
public-spirited citizen, when advised of the lack of a good cyclopaedia,
or of the latest extensive dictionary, or collective biography, in the
library, will be happy to supply it, thereby winning the gratitude and
good will of all who frequent the library. All donations should have
inserted in them a neat book-plate, with the name of the donor inscribed,
in connection with the name of the Library.

Many a useful library of circulation has been started with a beginning of
fifty to a hundred volumes, and the little acorn of learning thus planted
has grown up in the course of years to a great tree, full of fruitful and
wide-spreading branches.

CHAPTER 21.

CLASSIFICATION.

If there is any subject which, more than all others, divides opinion and
provokes endless controversy among librarians and scholars, it is the
proper classification of books. From the beginning of literature this has
been a well-nigh insoluble problem. Treatise after treatise has been
written upon it, system has been piled upon system, learned men have
theorised and wrangled about it all their lives, and successive
generations have dropped into their graves, leaving the vexed question as
unsettled as ever. Every now and then a body of _savans_ or a convention
of librarians wrestles with it, and perhaps votes upon it,

"And by decision more embroils the fray"

since the dissatisfied minority, nearly as numerous and quite as
obstinate as the majority, always refuses to be bound by it. No sooner
does some sapient librarian, with the sublime confidence of conviction,
get his classification house of cards constructed to his mind, and stands
rapt in admiration before it, when there comes along some wise man of the
east, and demolishes the fair edifice at a blow, while the architect
stands by with a melancholy smile, and sees all his household gods lying
shivered around him.

Meanwhile, systems of classification keep on growing, until, instead of
the thirty-two systems so elaborately described in Edwards's Memoirs of
Libraries, we have almost as many as there are libraries, if the endless
modifications of them are taken into account. In fact, one begins to
realise that the schemes for the classification of knowledge are becoming
so numerous, that a classification