ot promising to be content
with that position. What glorifies a town like a cathedral? What
dignifies a province like a university? What illuminates a country
like its scholarship, and what is the nest that hatches scholars but a
library?

The physician, some may say, is a practical man and has little use for
all this book-learning. Every student has heard Sydenham's reply to Sir
Richard Blackmore's question as to what books he should read,--meaning
medical books. "Read Don Quixote," was his famous answer. But Sydenham
himself made medical books and may be presumed to have thought those at
least worth reading. Descartes was asked where was his library, and in
reply held up the dissected body of an animal. But Descartes made books,
great books, and a great many of them. A physician of common sense
without erudition is better than a learned one without common sense, but
the thorough master of his profession must have learning added to his
natural gifts.

It is not necessary to maintain the direct practical utility of all
kinds of learning. Our shelves contain many books which only a certain
class of medical scholars will be likely to consult. There is a dead
medical literature, and there is a live one. The dead is not all
ancient, the live is not all modern. There is none, modern or ancient,
which, if it has no living value for the student, will not teach him
something by its autopsy. But it is with the live literature of his
profession that the medical practitioner is first of all concerned.

Now there has come a great change in our time over the form in
which living thought presents itself. The first printed books,--the
incunabula,--were inclosed in boards of solid oak, with brazen clasps
and corners; the boards by and by were replaced by pasteboard covered
with calf or sheepskin; then cloth came in and took the place of
leather; then the pasteboard was covered with paper instead of cloth;
and at this day the quarterly, the monthly, the weekly periodical in its
flimsy unsupported dress of paper, and the daily journal, naked as
it came from the womb of the press, hold the larger part of the fresh
reading we live upon. We must have the latest thought in its latest
expression; the page must be newly turned like the morning bannock; the
pamphlet must be newly opened like the ante-prandial oyster.

Thus a library, to meet the need of our time, must take, and must spread
out in a convenient form, a great array of periodic