tries
to read a French book without knowing the language, his mind is not fitted
for contact with that of the writer, and the mental machinery will not
move.

In the early days of the Open Shelf, before librarians had realised the
necessity of copious assignments to "floor duty," and before there were
children's librarians, I saw in a branch library a small child staggering
under the weight of a volume of Schaff's _History of the Christian
Church_, which he had taken from the shelves and was presenting at the
desk to be charged. "You are not going to read that, are you?" said the
desk assistant.

"It isn't for me; it's for me big brudder."

"What did your big brother ask you to get?"

"Oh, a Physiology!"

Nowadays, our well-organised children's rooms make such an occurrence
doubtful with the little ones, but apparently there is much of it with
adults.

Too much of our reading--I should rather say our attempts at reading--is
of this character. Such attempts are the result of a tendency to regard
the printed page as a fetich--to think that if one knows his alphabet and
can call the printed words one after another as his eye runs along the
line, some unexplained good will result, or at least that he has performed
a praiseworthy act, has "accumulated merit" somehow or somewhere, like a
Thibetan with his prayer-wheel.

It is probably a fact that if a man should meet you in the street and say,
"In beatific repentance lies jejune responsibility," you would stare at
him and pass him by, or perhaps flee from him as from a lunatic; whereas
if you saw these words printed in a book you might gravely study them to
ascertain their meaning, or still worse, might succeed in reading your own
meaning into them. The words I have strung together happen to have no
meaning, but the result would be the same if they meant something that was
hidden from the reader by his inability to understand them, no matter what
the cause of that inability might be.

This malady is doubtless spontaneous in some degree, and dependent on
failings of the human mind that we need not discuss here, but there are
signs that it is being fostered, spread, and made more acute by special
influences. Probably our educational methods are not altogether blameless.
The boy who trustfully approached a Reference Librarian and said, "I have
to write a composition on what I saw between home and school; have you got
a book about that?" had doubtless been taught that