kinds of training without proper selection of the persons to whom the training is to be applied.  Selection must be and is made, of course, but it is made on arbitrary lines, or for reasons unrelated to fitness.  One boy’s education lasts ten years, and another’s two, not because the former is fitted to profit by a longer period of training, but because his father happens to have money and inclination to give it to him.  One young man studies medicine and another goes into business, not because these are the careers for which they are specially fitted, but because one thinks that the prefix “Doctor” would look well in front of his name and the other has a maternal uncle in the dry-goods trade.

I am not so foolish as to think that selection of this kind could ever be made with unerring accuracy, but I do assert that an effort should be made to effect it in a greater degree through our regular educational institutions and to leave it less to chance.  Our present methods are like those of wild nature, which scatters seeds broadcast in the hope that some may settle on favoring soil, rather than those of the skilled cultivator, who sees that seed and soil are fitted for each other.

In this and other particulars I look for great improvement in our educational methods; but I do not think that, except in local and unessential particulars, here and there, they are now retrograding.

SOME ECONOMIC FEATURES OF LIBRARIES[4]

    [4] Read at the opening of the Chestnut Hill Branch, Philadelphia
        Free Library, January 22, 1909.

Of the three great divisions of economics—­production, distribution and consumption—­the library has to do chiefly with the second, and it is as a distributor of literature that I desire to speak of it, although it has its share both in the production and consumption of books—­more briefly, in the writing and reading of them.  Much writing of books is done wholly in libraries and by their aid, and much reading is done therein.  These functions I pass by with this brief notice.

A library distributes books.  So does a bookseller.  The functions of these two distributors, however, should differ somewhat as do those of the two producers of books—­the author and the publisher.  The author creates the soul of the book and the publisher gives it a body.  The former produces the immaterial, possibly the eternal, part and the latter merely the material part.  Likewise, in our distribution we librarians should lay stress upon what is in the book, upon the production of the author rather than on that of the publisher, though we may not neglect the latter.  We are, however, eminently distributors of ideas rather than of mere merchandise, and in so far as we lay stress on the material side of the book—­important as this is—­and neglect what is in it, we are but traders in books and not librarians.