It does not take much of a prophet to foresee a radical development in some of our American library schools within a very few years. When for example, the Columbia Library school was starting, manuscripts were so few in this country that their science and economy was a negligible element in instruction—and as for archives, we had plenty of documents but the very name archive, with what it connotes, was foreign and almost unknown in America. Now there are many well recognized archives and some of our collections of ancient manuscripts are numbered by the thousands. Many of you will probably live to see more than one library school equipped with full departments for instruction in palaeography and archival science, with special curricula for each distinguished from the general course in library economy. Possibly by that time there will also be departments of cartography, engraving and numismatics, each with its corps of instructors. In these respects it was something of a pity that the library school went out of the university, but on the whole it may be doubted if it would have ever had the great expansion or ever have done the great work that it has done for popular education if it had stayed in the university. In several very fundamental respects certainly this New York Public Library is a far better environment for developing a university of librarianship than any university of general studies. § 21. _The beginnings of library research_ What we have been saying to-day is only the rough blocking out of a subject for which anthropology and the excavations in the eastern Mediterranean region have furnished and are furnishing an enormous amount of source material, as yet wholly unexplored for library matters. A small part of the material has indeed been roughly explored and has yielded rich results in fields where there was absolutely nothing known before, but the unexplored matter is large and increasing rapidly every day. Library research it may fairly be said is itself in its beginnings, and American research in libraries for the older periods hardly yet begun. Of course, as we know Aristotle had some faint notion of anthropological methods and all the mythologizing people were, as is very thoroughly recognized now, pursuing a sort of scientific research and expressing and thinking in these figures of speech. In this point of view the myths as to Hermes and Thoth, Seshait and Minerva were, if not research, at least speculation on the origins.