When I first began to present these ideas, which seemed to me to be absurdly self-evident, it was gradually borne in upon me that most people considered them new and strange, both those who agreed with me and those who disagreed. But without going into the question of what music can and can not convey to the human mind, it seems clear to me that both music and language succeed in conveying _something_ to the human organism, and do it principally by sound-waves. In the case of both, there is a way of writing down what is to be conveyed, so that the record may be used by another person who wishes to convey it by sound, or so that a person, sufficiently skilled, may convey it to himself, without making an audible sound. These facts seem to me to establish so complete an analogy that we may treat music in a library precisely as we treat ordinary books, both in selection, distribution and use. If to complete the analogy we must insist on certain changes in the attitude toward music of both educators and readers, this kind of missionary work is after all no more and no other than that which the modern librarian, especially in America, is often called upon to do. I am a believer in the mission of music. The public library can do no more helpful thing to our modern life than to assist the public to understand and love it. The fact that it is not a representative art makes it all the more valuable as a means of detaching the mind from the things of this earth and transporting it to a separate world. A beautiful picture or statue or poem is anchored to the ground by the necessary associations of its subject matter. Music has no such anchor. It is free to soar, and soar it does, bearing with it the listening soul into regions that have no relations with the things of every day life. It may rest or it may stimulate; it may gladden or depress; but it does so by means of its own, not by reminding us of the stimulating or depressing things of our own past experience. In the multifarious mission of the Public Library, as we Americans see it, surely the popularization of good music is to assume no unimportant place. TWO CARDINAL SINS