What is a pamphlet? is a question which is by no means capable of being scientifically answered. Yet, to the librarian dealing continually with a mass of pamphlets, books, and periodicals, it becomes important to define somewhere, the boundary line between the pamphlet and the book. The dictionaries will not aid us, for they all call the pamphlet "a few sheets of printed paper stitched together, but not bound." Suppose (as often happens) that you bind your pamphlet, does it then cease to be a pamphlet, and become a book? Again, most pamphlets now published are not stitched at all, but stabbed and wired to fasten the leaves together. The origin of the word "pamphlet," is in great doubt. A plausible derivation is from two French words, "_paume_," and "_feuillet_," literally a hand-leaf; and another derives the word from a corruption of Latin--"_papyrus_," paper, into _pampilus_, or _panfletus_, whence pamphlet. The word is in Shakespeare: "Comest thou with deep premeditated lines, With written pamphlets studiously devised?" But we also find "pamphlets and bookys," in a work printed by Caxton in 1490, a hundred years before Shakespeare. Whatever the origin, the common acceptation of the word is plain, signifying a little book, though where the pamphlet ends, and the book begins, is uncertain. The rule of the British Museum Library calls every printed publication of one hundred pages or less, a pamphlet. This is arbitrary, and so would any other rule be. As that library binds its pamphlets separately, and counts them in its aggregate of volumes, the reason for any distinction in the matter is not plain. Some of the government libraries in Europe are greatly overrated numerically by reckoning pamphlets as volumes. Thus, the Royal Library at Munich, in Bavaria, has been ranked fourth among the libraries of the world, claiming over a million volumes, but as it reckons every university thesis, or discussion of some special topic by candidates for degrees, as a volume, and has perhaps 400,000 of this prolific class of publications, it is actually not so large as some American libraries, which count their pamphlets as distinct from books in their returns.