full supply of the best books in every field, avoiding (as previously urged) the bad or the inferior ones, but also that it has the best juvenile and elementary literature in ample supply. This subject of reading for the young has of late years come into unprecedented prominence. Formerly, and even up to the middle of our century, very slight attention was paid to it, either by authors or readers. Whole generations had been brought up on the New England Primer, with its grotesque wood-cuts, and antique theology in prose and verse, with a few moral narratives in addition, as solemn as a meeting-house, like the "Dairyman's Daughter," the "History of Sandford and Merton," or "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain." Very dreary and melancholy do such books appear to the frequenters of our modern libraries, filled as they now are with thousands of volumes of lively and entertaining juvenile books. The transition from the old to the new in this class of literature was through the Sunday-school and religious tract society books, professedly adapted to the young. While some of these had enough of interest to be fairly readable, if one had no other resource, the mass were irredeemably stale and poor. The mawkishness of the sentiment was only surpassed by the feebleness of the style. At last, weary of the goody-goody and artificial school of juvenile books, which had been produced for generations, until a surfeit of it led to something like a nausea in the public mind, there came a new type of writers for the young, who at least began to speak the language of reason. The dry bones took on some semblance of life and of human nature, and boys and girls were painted as real boys and genuine girls, instead of lifeless dolls and manikins. The reformation went on, until we now have a world of books for the young to choose from, very many of which are fresh and entertaining. But the very wealth and redundancy of such literature is a new embarrassment to the librarian, who must indispensably make a selection, since no library can have or ought to have it all. Recurring to the function of the public library as the coadjutor of the school, let us see what classes of books should form essential parts of its stores. 1. As geography, or an account of the earth on which we live, is a fundamental part of education, the library should possess a liberal selection of the best books in that science. The latest general gazetteer of the world, the best modern and a good ancient atlas, one or more of the great general collections of voyages, a set of Baedeker's admirable and inexpensive guide books, and descriptive works or travels in nearly all countries--those in America and Europe predominating--should be secured. The scholars of all grades will thus be able to supplement their studies by ready reference, and every part of the globe will lie open before them, as it were, by the aid of the library.