should be absurd if we should attempt to formulate a principle about what cognate activities might properly be admitted to the library and should include such things as these. But that is not the way in which it all came about. There was some group of citizens, anxious to engage in some activity, beneficial to themselves and to the community. They wanted a place to meet. Church and school, for one reason or another, real or imaginary, were out of the question, and they came to the library. The Library had an unoccupied room, heated and lighted. It had the choice of locking out citizens of the community that were supporting it out of the public funds, or of admitting them. Put in this way the library’s duty seems clear enough. But there is a step further still. Some demands for help are so old that the knocking at the door has passed out of the consciousness of both those who knock and those who hear. In this case it becomes necessary for the library to undertake what a recent scientific writer calls the “re-education of its attentive control”. When an institution reaches the conclusion that it is doing all that it can, or all that the community can properly ask of it, the chances are that it is losing its ability to concentrate. Its duty is to fix its attention on one element of community life after another and ask itself whether it is not overlooking some really insistent demand for help. I well remember when, in the New York Public Library we used complacently to explain our failure to purchase Hungarian books for circulation by saying that there was no demand for them. But the time came when we put in a few hundred books in that tongue. At once it became evident that we needed not hundreds but thousands. Hungarians came to us from far distant parts of the city only to find empty shelves. This overwhelming demand had been present all the time; only it was latent. It lacked active expression, simply because our lack of Hungarian books was a well known fact. Since then when librarians tell me that their libraries have no books in Ruthenian, or on sanitary plumbing, no out-of-town directories or no prints for circulation, because “there is no demand for them”, I am inclined to smile. No matter how near you may be to dying of thirst, you will not be likely to visit an obviously dry sand-bank in search of water. The intelligent search for these latent demands requires the kind of interested ability that I have already spoken of as one of the library’s chief needs. The library must keep on growing if it is to live. It must take on new functions, and when it assumes some new duty, some group in the community must exclaim “Of course! that is just what we have been wanting all the time”. And at the same time there will always be some outworn function that may be dropped off quietly to make room for the new.