In some of the late Babylonian libraries the clay tablets were evidently displayed on shelves but they were more commonly kept in clay boxes or jars, alabaster boxes, and the like, after the general fashion of the treasuries in earlier times and until the quantity became great. Twig records were tied together in bundles, and the stringing together of records was one of the earliest and most extensively used methods. It may perhaps be said that it was the typical method of the earliest records. It is found in the stringing together of trophy objects for wearing on the person—necklaces, girdles, and draped strings of various trophies. It is found also early in the history of the abacus where the perforated pebbles or beads were strung on different rods set in the ground, and it is of course found in the developed abacus. The perforations of tablets, bearing the year marks, among the objects from the earliest dynasties at Abydos, suggest a stringing together of these annual records, although it is of course possible that these are labels and the perforations used to attach them to boxes. The analogy with annual records of primitive people, however, suggests this stringing together. What may be called classification of these libraries is found very early. It is reflected perhaps in the early distinction between temple and palace libraries, and more clearly in the primitive distinction between shamans and secular recorders. The putting of like kinds of works in boxes together, medical works, etc., is found as early as 2700 B.C. in Egypt and quite early in Crete. The labels of Crete point to a classification of objects if not of object records. When collections are small no cataloguing is necessary excepting in the librarian’s mind, and his first mnemonic aid is classification, which is in fact a sort of cataloguing and takes the place of all other cataloguing. It is to be noted that in the very earliest records the librarian goes with the king or the investigating committee when they go to look up the records. § 20. _The beginnings of library schools_ The library school is commonly regarded as, and is, in a sense, a product of the last century. Library schools are, therefore, still a new thing. It may not seem so to you who had not been born when some of us were lecturing at that first American library school up at Columbia University, but it is the fact that the teachers of that school are still living and teaching, and there were no schools of library economy strictly speaking when they began. The well fledged library school as an avowed school and independent unit is a product of this generation.