Page:On the Difficulty of Correct Description of Books - De Morgan (1902).djvu/21

 tainly a second edition, at least. Now we learn in many places that in the second edition of Descartes's Geometry, by Schooten, the additions contain papers by Van Heuraet, Hudde, &c. of the greatest note in the early history of the differential calculus. Not the smallest trace of these things appears in the book before us. Some persons must have been puzzled by this: the truth is, that instead of naming the second edition of Descartes, by Schooten, writers should have named the second of Schooten's (12) editions of Descartes, Amsterdam, 1659, which has on the fly title, "Renati Descartes Geometria, Editio Secunda"—a wrong description. Thus it appears that the titles of the books themselves may contain the very errors which it is the tendency of bad catalogues to create when they do not exist, and which is very difficult to avoid, or to correct, even in good ones. This instance is particularly appropriate, for it is of the simplest kind. "It may help to enforce a truism which seems of late years to have been almost entirely lost sight of"—[a gentle mode of expression for vigorously denied and opposed]—"that the making of catalogues correctly, like the making of dictionaries, requires in the 'harmless drudge' who practices it an amount of qualifications which those who despise him are often far from possessing." This quotation comes out of the review of an attempt to catalogue the library of the linguist Mezzofanti, made by a Roman bookseller (13), who entered a Cingalese grammar, printed at Colombo, under the United States of America, and a Gaelic translation of Thomas à Kempis as a work of Chr[istopher?] Leanmhuinn, the words Leanmhuin Chriosd being Gaelic for De Imitatione Christi. It is not necessary to choose collections of so recondite a character before the opinion we have quoted can be given: if it were, it should then be added that a great public library like that of the museum is not [12] only a larger collection of languages than that