y prefer round-about
methods to short-hand ones.

Ask such an objector if he would prefer his dictionary of the English
language arranged, not alphabetically, but subjectively, so that all
medical terms should be defined only under medicine, all species of fish
described only under fishes, etc., and he will probably say that there is
no analogy in the case. But the analogy becomes apparent when we find, in
what are called systematic catalogues, no two systems alike, and the
finding of books complicated by endless varieties of classification, with
no common alphabet to simplify the search. The authors of systems
doubtless understand them themselves, but no one else does, until he
devotes time to learn the key to them; and even when learned, the
knowledge is not worth the time lost in acquiring it, since the field
covered in any one catalogue is so small. Alphabetical arrangement, on
the other hand, strictly adhered to, is a universal key to the authors
and subjects and titles of all the books contained in the library it
represents. The devotee of a bibliographical system may be as mistaken as
the slave of a scientific terminology. He forgets that bibliography is
not a school for teaching all departments of knowledge, but a brief and
handy index to books that may contain that knowledge. A student who has
once made a thorough comparative test of the merits, as aids to wide and
rapid research, of the old-fashioned bibliographies and the best modern
dictionary catalogues, will no more deny the superiority of the latter,
than he will contest the maxim that a straight line is the nearest road
between two points. Meantime, "while doctors disagree, disciples are
free;" and the disciples who would follow the latest guides in the art
"how to make and use a catalogue," must get rid of many formulas.

The reader will find in the chapter on bibliography, notes on some
classes of catalogues, with the more notable examples of them. We are
here concerned with the true method of preparing catalogues, and such
plain rules as brevity will permit to be given, will be equally adapted
to private or public libraries. For more ample treatment, with reasons
for and against many rules laid down, reference is made to the able and
acute work, "Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue," by C. A. Cutter,
published by the U. S. Bureau of Education, 3d ed. 1891.

CONDENSED RULES FOR AN AUTHOR AND TITLE CATALOGUE.

_Prepared by the Co-operation Committee o