But in our cities and large towns there can be no doubt that the greater number of the younger readers of a public library belong to the second of the two classes referred to--those who have none to guide them in the choice of their books. The most of these come, of course, simply for amusement, without a thought of any better use of the library. But a few come with other and higher aims. Some, with no specially strong tastes or more than ordinary capacities, merely wish to read that which will cultivate their minds and increase their knowledge, or will be profitable to them in their work. A very few there are, however, in every large town, with intellects of no mean order and strong ambitions, who turn to the library instinctively for that which will satisfy the cravings of their intellects and the promptings of their ambitions. A youth with the instincts of a Lincoln or a Webster comes to read the history of his country. Another, with the latent powers of a Nasmyth, a Stevenson, or an Arkwright, wants the books which will give full play to his inventive faculties. Another finds a strange and irresistible attraction in natural phenomena, in the habits of plants and animals, in the formation of the rocks and the hills, in the aspects of the skies and the movements of the stars. Now, it will depend very much upon the first choice of their books, and the subsequent direction of their reading, whether they will become men useful to the communities in which they live and add substantial material to the sum of human knowledge, as statesmen, inventors, naturalists, or astronomers. The danger is that, for lack of proper guidance and restraint, they will dissipate their mental energies and lose sight of all high aims by too much and too vague reading. If the public library is to be in fact, what it is in theory, an educating power second only to the church and the school, and supplementing the work of both, there must be some method devised by which such readers as these may be helped to choose the right books. Without such aid, given continually and systematically, the library fails in the principal end for which it was founded--the elevation and instruction of the people. We might as well turn our children into a school-house, fully furnished with books and apparatus, but with only a janitor to see that no injury is done to them, and expect the children to make a wise use of their opportunities, to take up and pursue the proper studies without the aid of a master, as to give children the free range of a great library and expect them undirected to make a wise use of its advantages as a means of education. It is, therefore, in my opinion, a most pernicious error to encourage young people, of the lower classes especially, to come to a library, and to give them poor stories in the mistaken belief that, the taste for reading being developed, they will naturally and surely rise from these to better books. Such a belief