al
literature, and have attempted to do justice to its value. But the
almost exclusive reading of it is not without its dangers. The journals
contain much that is crude and unsound; the presumption; it might be
maintained, is against their novelties, unless they come from observers
of established credit. Yet I have known a practitioner,--perhaps more
than one,--who was as much under the dominant influence of the last
article he had read in his favorite medical journal as a milliner under
the sway of the last fashion-plate. The difference between green and
seasoned knowledge is very great, and such practitioners never hold long
enough to any of their knowledge to have it get seasoned.

It is needless to say, then, that all the substantial and permanent
literature of the profession should be represented upon our shelves.
Much of it is there already, and as one private library after another
falls into this by the natural law of gravitation, it will gradually
acquire all that is most valuable almost without effort. A scholar
should not be in a hurry to part with his books. They are probably
more valuable to him than they can be to any other individual. What
Swedenborg called "correspondence" has established itself between
his intelligence and the volumes which wall him within their sacred
inclosure. Napoleon said that his mind was as if furnished with
drawers,--he drew out each as he wanted its contents, and closed it
at will when done with them. The scholar's mind, to use a similar
comparison, is furnished with shelves, like his library. Each book knows
its place in the brain as well as against the wall or in the alcove. His
consciousness is doubled by the books which encircle him, as the trees
that surround a lake repeat themselves in its unruffled waters. Men talk
of the nerve that runs to the pocket, but one who loves his books, and
has lived long with them, has a nervous filament which runs from his
sensorium to every one of them. Or, if I may still let my fancy draw
its pictures, a scholar's library is to him what a temple is to the
worshipper who frequents it. There is the altar sacred to his holiest
experiences. There is the font where his new-born thought was baptized
and first had a name in his consciousness. There is the monumental
tablet of a dead belief, sacred still in the memory of what it was while
yet alive. No visitor can read all this on the lettered backs of the
books that have gathered around the schola