Nevertheless it may be said that the question of “memory” among plants is seriously discussed and plants may perhaps receive impression as sensitively as animals. It is a little figurative to say that a tree which carries in itself a hundred annual records of its growth is a library in the sense of a public record office which keeps the annals of a nation’s growth for a like period. There is however a certain analogy which the discussions of natural records and object writing suggests may even have some slight germ of scientific interest. Of course where there is memory there may be groups of memorized records which would be collections of very rudimentary “Books”, but so far the weight of evidence seems to be against the existence even in animals, let alone plants, of that kind of memory which retains permanently fixed forms of expression. Sub-human libraries may therefore be for the present left to the fabulists and put with apocryphal, legendary and mythological libraries outside the pale of the real or historical libraries. § 8. _Preadamite libraries_ Whatever psychologists and mythologists may have to say about libraries before the existence of the human race, there seems to be a surprising consensus of opinion that book collections must have started at latest very soon after man himself. A great number of such libraries are claimed by the ancients for the period between Adam and Noah, and if there were human beings before Adam, as many say, it is likely that there were at least memory libraries, for, as will be seen later in discussing memory libraries, these are almost inseparable from human nature. And further than this it appears from those very same sources, which so fluently allege and describe the library of Adam, that the books of Adam’s library represent such an advanced stage in the evolution of handwritten records as to necessitate a long library history previous to his time. These books included e.g., it is said, inscriptions cut in stone, and such inscriptions imply centuries if not tens of centuries of knot and other mnemonic forms of writing, preceding. Therefore if Adam’s library was as described in its literature, there must have been, for a long time before, Preadamite libraries!