If there can be such a thing as a bibliographic bureau for the United States, the Library of Congress is in a way to become one; to a degree, in fact, a bureau of information for the United States. Besides routine workers efficient as a body, it has already some expert bibliographers and within certain lines specialists. It has not a complete corps of these. It cannot have until Congress can be made to understand the need of them. Besides its own employees, however, it has within reach by telephone a multitude of experts. They are maintained by the very government which maintains it. They are learned men, efficient men, specially trained, willing to give freely of their special knowledge. They enter the government employ and remain there, not for the pecuniary compensation, which is shamefully meagre, but for the love of the work itself and for the opportunity for public service which it affords. Of these men, in the scientific bureaus at Washington, the National Library can take counsel: it can secure their aid to develop its collections and to answer inquiries of moment. This will be within the field of the natural and physical sciences. Meantime within its walls it possesses already excellent capacity for miscellaneous research, and special capacity for meeting inquiries in history and topography, in general literature, and in the special literature of economics, mathematics and physics. It has still Ainsworth Spofford and the other men, who with him, under extraordinary disadvantages, for thirty-five years made the library useful at the Capitol. The library is already issuing publications in book form. In part these are catalogs of its own contents; in part an exhibit of the more important material in existence on some subject of current interest, particularly, of course, in connection with national affairs. Even during the period of organization fifteen such lists have already been issued. They are distributed freely to libraries and even to individual inquirers.