Some readers visit the Library for prolonged and serious and fruitful investigation--others for only momentary purpose to verify a quotation, or to settle a wager about the origin, the meaning, or the orthography of a word. Many books have been written, and many more have been edited or corrected, by the aid of the copious stores of every great library. To respond adequately to all these and countless more demands upon its intellectual resources, a National Library must clearly be one of universal range. This comprehensive aim for the National Library will appear still more important when it is considered that it is, in effect, the only really representative library of the nation. Not that other collections (and many of them, let us hope) are not equally far-reaching in their scope and their aim at completeness; but the Government Library being the only one endowed with the full copyright production of the country, its law of growth is necessarily in advance of that of other collections, however well endowed--provided only that adequate care be taken by Congress for its proper increase in other directions. The copyright law brings into it, year by year, virtually the entire intellectual product of the nation so far as protected by copyright; as well as a steadily increasing share (since the extension of the area of copyright protection through the international provisions of the act of 1891) of the works of foreign authors. Thus the National Library acquires a great store of publications which the other libraries do without, from lack of means, or of room, or of disposition to purchase.