rudition 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 periodicals. Our active
practitioners read these by preference over almost everything else. Our
specialists, more particularly, depend on the month's product, on the
yearly crop of new facts, new suggestions, new contrivances, as much as
the farmer on the annual yield of his acres. One of the first wants,
then, of the profession is supplied by our library in its great array of
periodicals from many lands, in many languages. Such a number of medical
periodicals no private library would have room for, no private person
would pay for, or flood his tables with if they were sent him for
nothing. These, I think, with the reports of medical societies and the
papers contributed to them, will form the most attractive part of our
accumulated medical treasures. They will be also one of our chief
expenses, for these journals mu