3. Education, general and technical. Any such librarian, with only a fairly equipped library, will find her opportunity at her hand. SOME PRINCIPLES OF BOOK AND PICTURE SELECTION. BY G. E. WIRE, M.D., LL.B., _Worcester County (Mass.) Law Library_. 1. _Books and pictures should be suited to the constituency._--This may seem so trite, so self-evident as to need no statement, much less any argument to support it. But on sober second thought, all will agree that it needs constant reiteration and appreciation. All of us are familiar with libraries--of course not our own--in which we detect glaring inconsistencies in book selection. The story used to be told of one library commission that in its first epoch it used to send the books on agriculture to the sea-coast, and books on fish curing to the hill country. This is now strenuously denied but there may be more truth than poetry in it after all. In the case of large, 50,000 v. libraries and over, less care need be taken, both on account of expenditure of money and on account of worthlessness of the book itself. A few hundred dollars' worth of rubbish, more or less, does not count and almost any book no matter how poor comes in use some time. But in the case of the small, 5000 v. library or under, with little money to expend and the whole realm of knowledge to cover, it is different. Of course the covering will be scanty and thin, but it will do for the first layer. They should buy but few books in philosophy and religion, more in sociology, only the latest and most popular in the arts and sciences, comparatively fewer in literature and more in history, biography and travel. Of course fiction, adult and juvenile, must also be bought and at first a disproportionately larger amount in many cases. Too much reliance should not be placed on what some larger library has or on what the neighboring library has. Avoid imitation and duplication, especially the latter. Now that inter-library loans are coming in, each small library in the more thickly settled portions of the country may be able to supplement its neighbor. Travelling libraries should also help out the smaller libraries which can ill afford to sink a large part of their annual book-fund in evanescent fiction, which soon moulds on the shelves. As the commissions become better organized, they should also be able to send expensive reference works for the use of study clubs, and so help the small libraries all the more.