Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom you will recognize without my adding the M. D. to his name, expressed himself as follows before the Medical Library Association of Boston in 1878: "A great many books may be found in every large collection which remind us of those Apostolic looking old men who figure on the platform at our political and other assemblages. Some of them have spoken words of wisdom in their day, but they have ceased to be oracles. Some of them never had any particularly important message for humanity, but they add dignity to the meeting by their presence. They look wise whether they are so or not, and no one grudges them their place of honor. Venerable figure heads, what would our platforms be without you?"

Gentlemen, ask Dr Dudley Allen for an answer. It is he that is my reason for being here and my opportunity to address you. He permitted me to be present at the inauguration of your new library building. Every new library has always engaged my interest; mostly so every medical library. Personal experience of decades ago has added to it. In 1875 I went to Europe for the special purpose of consulting large collections in behalf of a booklet I had promised to write. I settled in small University towns of Switzerland and Western Germany. After spending several months in vain, both their collections and their reading rooms being quite unsatisfactory, I returned to my own bookshelves and the books collected by the New York Medical Journal Association which furnished a richer harvest.

The Medical Journal Association of New York was formed 40 years ago when there was no public medical library in New York City. The New York Academy of Medicine had existed

20 years without any. It counted dozens of old, and famous, and learned men amongst its members, but it was the young element that helped along by the enthusiastic bibliophile Dr Purple, by John C. Peters, and others—finally fitted up a reading room in No. 64 Madison avenue. Many journals were taken. Several years afterward the library thus originated was given to the Academy of Medicine, which at that time had its own building in No. 12 West 31st street. These small beginnings created, with slow progress, a large library,, now for many years alongside the rapidly growing and richly endowed Boston Library, the largest in the country, except that of the Surgeon General's office in Washington. It contains today 70,840 books and 27,080 pamphlets. It would carry me too far to tell you the particulars of our growth. Both professional men and the public have contributed to making the library what it is today. A lady who had aided us in creating our new building 17 years ago, gave us $15,000 for our library fund to enable us to purchase new books -claiming that of all her public donations none had given her the same persistent satisfaction that she derived from her gifts to the Academy of Medicine. I cannot but bespeak for the medical profession of Cleveland-admired for its ethical standing and its contributions to sound practice and to the literary advancement of the country-the same generosity on the part of the public.

A large medical library, besides being the proof of existing culture and of accumulated intellectual labor, fulfills its destiny by giving information. Here the medical man with scanty means will find his text-books and monographs to aid him in unravelling the difficulties of a case on hand. He who has an ample library of his own, will consult rare books, old journals, expensive works. Here a vast number of journals may be consulted from day to day; here those who are engaged in literary pursuits find their historical records. Moreover, and that is a point upon which I cannot insist too much, a library causes the inculcation in a great many of the habit of study and research. Here, as always, opportunity creates demand. In that result the public is as much interested as is the profession. The safety of the public requires cultured and erudite physicians. Both the ethical and the intellectual standard of both parties will stand or grow or fall together.

The origin and brief history of medical libraries appears to have been the same at all times.

From Dr John Morgan's "Discourse upon the Institution of Medical Schools in America," delivered 1765, I quote, according to an address by Dr Osler before the Association of Medical Librarians in 1902, the following extract:

"Perhaps the physicians of this Association, touched with generous sentiments of regard for the rising generation and the manifest advantages accruing to the College thereby, would spare some useful books or contribute somewhat as a foundation on which we might begin."

That appeal sounds pitiful, is pitiful; still it had to be made hundreds of times, and should be made wherever the means of professional men are too scanty to establish a library.

Few physicians are in a position to purchase many books; no one has a complete library, not even a specialist may have all the books and journals of his branch of study and practice. That was different one hundred years ago, when the United States had three medical journals: the Medical Repository from July 26, 1797, to 1824; the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal from November 1, 1804, to May, 1809; and the Medical and Agricultural Magazine for the year 1806-7, of which only one volume appeared; Great Britain published seven. A well-to-do physician might have bought them all, but at present? The New York Academy of Medicine takes more than a thousand. If you individually take as many journals as you wish to have handy, your shelf room fails you. Many years ago I erected an addition to my library and piled up books in double rows. Many times, however, when I required one, it was easier to send for it from the public library than to climb up and search it out. When I changed my residence years ago I had to give away 5,000 volumes and learned the lesson of disposing of my possessions to my own convenience and in the common interest. A public library of 100,000 volumes makes every medical man of the neighborhood practically the owner of 100,000 volumes. By giving away you enrich a hundred or a thousand men without impoverishing yourself. No matter, however, where the library came from, by using it, you and the other men become intellectual and professional twin-brothers. Twenty men working in silence in a library grow in respect for each other, in ethical feeling, in professional brotherhood.

Even the smallest library in a county seat has a similar effect. Indeed, a book is society, even in a poor doctor's office; often the society of a peer, frequently of a superior man. A

dozen good books is a companionship of twelve. Those who live alone and practice alone in the country, know that better than we appreciate it. They meet their colleagues rarely, their country societies meet once every two, or three or six monthsor not at all. But in a book they may carry a friend on the saddlebag, in the buggy; and in the smallest library of a county society they have as many friends as they can take home with them and give hospitality to.

I am connected with the Association of Medical Librarians and am fully acquainted with the book hunger mainly of those who for the present have to be satisfied with small collections. This book hunger and book appreciation is not, however, a feature of our modern era only. Books and libraries have always been held in high esteem and great influence has always been attributed to them. Assurbanipal, sometimes called Sardanapal, the son of Sanherib, who, in 701 B. C. subdued Hiskias the King of Juda, founded in 670 B. C. a school and the Kujundschik Library in Nineveh, for no other purpose but to break up the influence of the learned and teaching clergy of Babylon, and succeeded until Kyaxares the Mede destroyed Nineveh in 606. Since Layard's time, about 20,000 inscribed tiles, part of that Assyrian library, have been stored in the British Museum. The Egyptians had two large libraries at Memphis before Ptolemy Philadelphus established one in Alexandria, which is said to have contained 700,000 books-that means rolls. It was burned by Julius Caesar in the war of 48 and 47. To repair the damage, Anthony gave to Kleopatra the big library stolen at the conquest of Pergamom-so we are told by Plutarch. Alexandria had a second library of 42,000 books, destined for the purpose of instructing students in the temple of Serapis. It survived until the time of Theodosius the Great and was burned, not by the Mohammedan Omar in 641, but by the Christians under Archbishop Theophilus. Books were always amongst the things robbed, like objects of art pillaged all over Europe by Napoleon.

Pisistratus founded a large library in Athens; Xerxes stole it and took it to Persia, whence it was returned by Seleucus Nicator. Rome exhibits a similar history. Aemilius Paulus brought a library from Greece, the first large one Rome ever had, in 168 B. C., and Sulla added to it from trophies of war. Lucullus robbed another and kept it open to the public. Caesar planned one but did not succeed; that of Alexandria he had burned, and the illiterate Gauls did their writing with swords, clubs, and

rocks. Under Augustus, Rome had two large libraries. One existed until the reign of the great pope Gregor, who destroyed the books of the ancients because they were heathenish. That Nero burned several, goes without saying. The largest was founded by Ulpius Trajanus-about his time populous cities took a pride in collecting books. The library founded in Byzantium by Constantius was destroyed by the emperor Leo. The migrations of armed nations of the early medieval period destroyed men, women, children, fields and towns, and books. During that period there was nobody to care for books except the Mohammedans and the Benedictine monks. Thus it is no wonder that ancient literature is scanty-indeed it is almost miraculous that so much is left, particularly when we remember that the rolls of papyrus were very perishable. Pliny tells us that the life of a roll of papyrus--parchment manuscripts were scarce-amounted to 100 years, and those lasting 200 years were extremely rare.

You will have recent and old books in your library. Why old ones? Let me here quote Holmes, in whose company I like to move always, even when he is mistaken-as for instance in his witty criticism of therapeutics. He has sinned so little, however, that he may be forgiven. He says:

"There is true pleasure in reading the accounts of great discoveries in the own words of the author. I do not pretend to hoist up the Bibliotheca Anatomica of Mangetus and spread it on my table every day. I do not get out my great Albinus before every lecture on the muscles or disturb the majestic repose of Vesalius every time I speak of the bones he has so admirably described and figured; but it does please me to read the first descriptions of parts to which the names of their discoverers have become so joined that not even modern science can part them; to listen to the talk of my old volume, as Willis describes his circle, and Fallopius his aqueduct, and Varolius his bridge, and Eustachius his tube, and Monro his foramen. .. . I am not content until I know in what language Harvey announced his discovery of the circulation, and how Spigelius made the liver his perpetual memorial, and Malpighi found a momument more enduring than brass in the corpuscies of the spleen and the kidney."

"There are practical books among these ancient volumes which can never grow old. Would you know how to recognize a 'male hysteria,' and to treat it?-take down your Sydenham. Would you read the experience of a physician who was himself