Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/199

 Correspondence. 187 prior to the completion of the first issue, and I believe both issues were completed concurrently in 1889. No mention is made of any corrections in the earlier volumes, and the natural inference was quite consistent with the publisher's assertion that no revision had been made. I now turn to specific articles in the two copies of vol. i., purporting to be the same. AGRICULTURE. Under this subject (p. 416) there is an excision of no less than forty-nine lines of the text. The section of the article deals with agricultural co-operation. In the first issue of vol. i. there is no alphabetical list of the contents to this article, but in the re-issue the omission is rectified by an index of over two hundred references. Unfortunately, however, to make room for the index, and at the same time to preserve the apparent identity of the volumes, it was necessary to omit some of the general text, of which the following is the con- cluding portion sacrificed : " From the foregoing review the moral to be drawn is two-fold : first, that all varieties of tenure, having apparently some natural affinity for the circumstances out of which they have arisen or by which they are surrounded, have presumably some special virtue which ought to secure them against unqualified condemnation a priori ', and secondly, that landed tenure should be left absolutely free to adapt itself naturally, by gradual modification, to changing circumstances, without arti- ficial coercion or restraint of any kind. Whatever be the conflicting pretensions- of seignorial and peasant proprietorship, or of large or small farming, it must always be, in an agricultural sense, equally impolitic to seek by legal enactment,, on the one hand, to bind or hold land together, or on the other to accelerate its subdivision. However patent the superiority of leases over tenancy at will, the statutory prohibition of these and the statutory', prescription of those would involve an interference with freedom of contract, equally un- warrantable in either case. Whatever be the virtue latent in industrial co-operation, all virtue goes out from it when, instead of being left to introduce itself spontaneously, it is forcibly obtruded or patronisingly led for- ward. The only assistance, apart from the organisation of some simple process for the verification of titles to land, which agriculture requires or can safely accept from law, is removal of the artificial obstructions which law has placed in its way of the legal sanction given to primogeniture and entails in England, of the legal compulsion imposed upon testatorship in France, of all those legal impedi- ments, in short, by which immovable is prevented from being utilised with the same facility as movable property. If in any conceivable circumstances it might be expedient legislatively to foster the growth or arrest the decay of a peasant proprietory, or to promote co-operative farming, the considerations warranting measures of the kind must be social or political rather than agricultural, and, as such, do not fall within the scope of this paper." AMERICA. An illustration of revision similar to the foregoing will be found under this subject. The article first appeared without an index of contents. The omission was supplied when the volume was re-issued,, certain portion:, of the text being deleted to give space for the new matter inserted. ANATOMY. The complex nature of this subject, combined with the length of the article, which runs to no pages, makes an index of the con- tents of paramount value to the student who consults it. This essential key is lacking in the first issue of vol. i. ; but it mysteriously appears in the re-issue of the unrevised " ninth " edition. The importance of the index may be gathered from the fact that there are over three hundred references. The last two pages of the article have been mercilessly mutilated, rather than revised, in order to meet the arbitrary exigencies of the stereo, plates. ARCHAEOLOGY. The treatment of this most interesting subject in vol. ii. affords a variation in the examples of excision and addition. In the