Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/244

 2^2 The Library. relics of the past. And now there had been a hundred years of study and collection of the writings of the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries. It resulted in a congress of scholars, which really turned out to be a congress of librarians. The burning question was : How shall we digest and classify learning that we may not degenerate into the high-pressure night-work, the intellectual debauchery, and nervous tension which ruined the Great Civilisation ? We must allow specialists to accumulate all the details they want ; but we must have some state-pre- scribed method of digesting research, and abolishing the insanity of competition, with its wearisome individual repetition of the same facts. Then I saw in my dream that a board of scholars sat and prepared and revised, and were always preparing and revising, a standing cyclopaedia. It was the Cyclopaedia : it had no rival, and needed none. There were two editions, the long and the short. But I said that the congress of scholars resolved into a congress of librarians. This was because the plan of the Cyclopaedia was soon determined, and students were forthwith put to work on it. And they had the great Britannica for a prototype. But the librarians remained : they had a harder question to settle : how to classify a library ? A copy of Cutter's Rules had been unearthed, and that settled the cata- logue question ; but classification was the crux. Then I heard the din and gnashing of long debates : as a nineteenth century girl once put it, " theological language was used," but with no result to the cause of librarianship. But at last one of the quieter librarians, who had used no bad words, came forward and proclaimed that he had had a vision. The Oriental influx had re-established a healthy and non-morbid belief in (or rather, knowledge of) visions, and the wearied congress heard the an- nouncement like tidings of rain in summer. The seer then told how he had seen that no metaphysical, no scientific, nay, no " practical " system of classification was of any avail to gods or men. He saw in his vision, and so did I, an ideal library. There were two departments therein, and every book was duplicated one in each department. These departments were the geographical and the historical corres- ponding to the fundamental concepts of space and time. (Laughter, and cries of " Metaphysics ! ") But the seer went calmly on. Such a classification is an education in itself to every one walking through the library halls and reading the signs over the alcoves, especially when familiar enough with the