Page:Insect Literature by Lafcadio Hearn.djvu/444



NE of the great defects of English books printed in the last century is the want of an index. The importance of being able to refer at once to any subject treated of in a book was not recognised until the days when exact scholarship necessitated indexing of the most elaborate kind. But even now we constantly find good books severely criticised because of this deficiency. All that I have said tends to show that even to-day in western countries the immense importance of systematic arrangement in literary collections is not sufficiently recognised. We have, of course, a great many English anthologies,—that is to say, collections of the best typical compositions of a certain epoch in poetry or in prose. But you must have observed that, in western countries, nearly all such anthologies are compiled chronologically—not according to the subject of the poems. To this general rule there are indeed a few exceptions. There is a collection of love poetry by 註