It is no objection to a library that no man will ever read it through. No man will read through his dictionary, and time is not long enough for a man to read all the words in the daily _Tribune_. Nor will any customer exhaust a store. Yet he demands an assortment from which to select the little that he needs. In every library most authors, bound up in congenial calf, sleep soundly in their own sheets. Yet the dust of dead men's bones, at the touch of genius, comes forth in a new life. How much that is best in Macaulay and in Buckle is extracted from bibliothecal rubbish--or reading which had never been read. Hence even Samson could not say to the jaw-bone of an ass: "I have no need of you." The wise thank God for fools. They get their living out of them, and mostly out of the greatest fools. In truth, no library is large enough. Guizot and Michelet complain of inability to consult certain books, even in that Parisian library, where books are as plenty as water in the deluge, and the shelves would reach from here to Milwaukee. A library should be a cosmos; but it is a chaos till arrangement, catalogues and librarians bring us at once the volume we desire, and which, without them, would be as hard to fish up as the Atlantic cable lost in mid-ocean. "Thus warlike arms in magazines we place, All ranged in order and disposed with grace: Not thus alone the curious eye to please, But to be _found_, when need requires, with ease." In some libraries, however, books are arranged on a system which seems borrowed from Spanish hospitals, where patients are arranged according to religious creeds, rather than bodily complaints. Every library has more volumes than I can master; but no library though it be the conflux of all civilizations, has so many volumes as I may need to consult. Chief Justice Story used to assert that no American could test the accuracy of Gibbon without crossing the Atlantic. Such an assertion would now, perhaps, be extravagant, yet many of Gibbon's references are still hard to trace in America. One instance may be worth notice. Our approaching national centenary leads us to curiosity in reference to the secular feasts of the Romans. In Gibbon's account of the most famous among them, a thousand years from the founding of Rome, the main authority quoted is Zosimus. But the history of Zosimus you will seek in vain throughout Madison libraries. You will not find his name in the public collections of Chicago, or Cincinnati, or St. Louis, or San Francisco. It is unlikely that any single copy of Zosimus has yet penetrated west of our Atlantic slope. But how dare I thus speak about Zosimus? How is it possible for me to know whether his history can, or cannot, be discovered, either on the Pacific shore, or in the Mississippi valley? I know it, thanks to the Library of Our Historical Society, and specifically to its goodly array of bibliothecal catalogues.