human
Last Autumn ... I read with respectful astonishment a letter to 'The Times' from a writer who preferred to veil his identity under the modest signature of 'a Scholar.' There I read that 'the studious public of this country and Europe in general have been surprised by the news that the authorities of the British Museum seriously contemplate the compilation of a subject index to the vast collection of printed books in that library.' I can assure you that the surprise of the studious public and of Europe in general cannot have surpassed my own when I thus learned of what the authorities were seriously contemplating. Nevertheless, it left me able, I thought, to discern that their vast conceptions had not been so fortunate as to gain the approval of 'a Scholar' and to marvel whence _The Times_ and other great journals had drawn their truly surprising information. Some of the arguments put forth in sundry criticisms of the 'scheme' showed how much thought had been bestowed upon matters which then first dazzled my bewildered imagination. It may come some day (who shall say what will not?), this General Index, or it may never come. But up to the present moment I am aware of no authority who is seriously contemplating so large a venture unless perhaps it be 'a Scholar' himself.
gpt
Experience has taught us that there is no form of subject-index which the public values so highly as one which gives the most recent literature on every possible subject. And to meet this manifest want we shall certainly continue to issue, with all the latest improvements I hope, the modest Indexes which we have hitherto published in five-yearly (I am afraid as President of The Library Association I should say 'in quinquennial') volumes. The Museum sweeps its net so wide and in such remote seas that a more or less complete collection of books on almost every subject or historical event is gathered within it for future students. To take only two incidents from the last year or two, the next index will contain not less than a hundred and forty books and pamphlets, in almost every European tongue, on the Dreyfus case, and from four to five hundred books on the present war in South Africa. Such bibliographical tests have more than an ephemeral or immediate value. They will remain as records of events or phases of thought long after their causes shall have faded from all but the page of history.