Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/531

Rh During this month the total home circulation of these branch libraries was 131,700, and that of the sciences was 8,553, or 6.5 per cent. The first thing that strikes one is that this is a very small percentage. It is not so as compared with other libraries, as the smaller table shows; and of course it is impossible to say a priori what amount of scientific literature a public library ought to circulate; but taken in connection with other facts in the writer's experience as a librarian, it is believed that these figures show a general lack of public interest in science—the same lack of interest that has been brought out of late by several writers who note the general want of consideration for science and scientific men in this country as compared with those of Europe. But while this smallness of our scientific reading is doubtless symptomatic of something deeper, it is probable that interest in science might be stimulated in the library itself. The librarian has numerous effective ways of increasing the reading in a particular class of literature, but none of them appears to have been generally used in this case. Lists and bibliographies, in history, for instance, are very much more numerous than in science, probably for the reason that public librarians and also the teachers with whom they come most in contact are generally more interested in the former subject than in the latter.

Scientific men themselves could doubtless do much to better matters, and I am sure that those in charge of public libraries would welcome suggestions from them regarding the character of their scientific books and plans for making those books attractive to the public and stimulating interest in them. Men like Mr. Hodges, of Cincinnati, who is both a librarian and a scientific man, are doing much toward putting science on a better footing in our public circulating libraries, as his paper read at the recent conference of the American Library Association shows. A glance at the numerical table shows that the public interest in science is not even as great as the total figure would seem to indicate. The largest circulation by far in any one of the thirty subclasses represented is in 420—English philology. But in this are included many volumes of elementary language lessons, etc., which are used in connection with school work, and these doubtless account for the size of this figure. Next comes 370—education, and although it is interesting to see that books on this subject are so popular, their popularity has little to do with a general appreciation of the importance of scientific literature.

The next largest circulation is in 590—zoology. Here at last we have a natural science. But among works on zoology are classed a large number of popular animal stories, which probably make up a considerable number of the 778 books in this subject read during the month.