of individuals to do the
work, and a large amount of money to pay for making its results public
through the press. When it is remembered that the catalogue of the
library of the British Museum is contained in nearly three thousand
large folios of manuscript, and not all its books are yet included, the
task of indexing any considerable branch of science or literature looks
as if it were well nigh impossible. But many hands make light work. An
"Index Society" has been formed in England, already numbering about one
hundred and seventy members. It aims at "supplying thorough indexes
to valuable works and collections which have hitherto lacked them; at
issuing indexes to the literature of special subjects; and at gathering
materials for a general reference index." This society has published a
little treatise setting forth the history and the art of indexing, which
I trust is in the hands of some of our members, if not upon our shelves.

Something has been done in the same direction by individuals in our own
country, as we have already seen. The need of it in the department of
medicine is beginning to be clearly felt. Our library has already an
admirable catalogue with cross references, the work of a number of its
younger members cooperating in the task. A very intelligent medical
student, Mr. William D. Chapin, whose excellent project is indorsed by
well-known New York physicians and professors, proposes to publish a
yearly index to original communications in the medical journals of the
United States, classified by authors and subjects. But it is from the
National Medical Library at Washington that we have the best promise
and the largest expectations. That great and growing collection of fifty
thousand volumes is under the eye and hand of a librarian who knows
books and how to manage them. For libraries are the standing armies
of civilization, and an army is but a mob without a general who can
organize and marshal it so as to make it effective. The "Specimen
Fasciculus of a Catalogue of the National Medical Library," prepared
under the direction of Dr. Billings, the librarian, would have excited
the admiration of Haller, the master scholar in medical science of
the last century, or rather of the profession in all centuries, and if
carried out as it is begun will be to the nineteenth all and more
than all that the three Bibliothecae--Anatomica, Chirurgica, and
Medicinae-Practicae--were to the eighteenth century. I cannot forg