To place one's self in communication with them as contained in these libraries, is to bring ourselves in contact with the stored-up thought of the world thus far. We have just adverted to the fundamental bearing which this has upon the deeper or spiritual side of man's life. But the two-sided character of these collections of books follows us even here, for their indispensableness in the material point of view is almost as striking, and this, not only whether we consider the statesman planning measures of public weal, while neglecting to inform himself of the recorded conditions which necessarily must determine such measures; or whether it be the inventor spending long years of his too brief life in perfecting a machine which his consultation of the recorded patent would have shown him some one else had anticipated him in thinking out; or whether it be the day laborer submitting without an effort to violations of his rights, which a single glance at the recorded statutes would have shown him he had a remedy for. How like all this is to the supposed state of things which one of the most suggestive writers of our day has thus expressed: "Our early voyagers are dead: not a plank remains of the old ships that first essayed unknown waters; the sea retains no track; and were it not for the history of these voyages contained in charts, in chronicles, in hoarded lore of all kinds, each voyager, though he were to start with all the aids of advanced civilization," would be in the helpless position of the earliest voyager.