the hand of Francis Rabelais? And the
vellum-bound Tulpius, which I came upon in Venice, afterwards my only
reading when imprisoned in quarantine at Marseilles, so that the two
hundred and twenty-eight cases he has recorded are, many of them, to
this day still fresh in my memory. And the Schenckius,--the folio filled
with casus rariores, which had strayed in among the rubbish of the
bookstall on the boulevard,--and the noble old Vesalius with its grand
frontispiece not unworthy of Titian, and the fine old Ambroise Pare,
long waited for even in Paris and long ago, and the colossal Spigelius
with his eviscerated beauties, and Dutch Bidloo with its miracles of
fine engraving and bad dissection, and Italian Mascagni, the despair of
all would-be imitators, and pre-Adamite John de Ketam, and antediluvian
Berengarius Carpensis,--but why multiply names, every one of which
brings back the accession of a book which was an event almost like the
birth of an infant?

A library like ours must exercise the largest hospitality. 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 places of honor. Venerable figure-heads,
what would our platforms be without you?

Just so with our libraries. Without their rows of folios in creamy
vellum, or showing their black backs with antique lettering of tarnished
gold, our shelves would look as insufficient and unbalanced as a column
without its base, as a statue without its pedestal. And do not think
they are kept only to be spanked and dusted during that dreadful period
when their owner is but too thankful to become an exile and a wanderer
from the scene of single combats between dead authors and living
housemaids. Men were not all cowards before Agamemnon or all fools
before the days of Virchow and Billroth. And apart from any practical
use to be derived from the older medical authors, is there not a true
pleasure in reading the accounts of great discoverers in their own
words? I do not pretend to hoist up the Bibliotheca Anatomica of
Mangetus and spread it on my table every day. I do not