In your reading for material do not cultivate habits of economy or parsimony.  You should always have a considerable amount of good fact left over, for unless you know a good deal of the region on the outskirts of your argument you will feel cramped and uncertain within it.  The effect of having something in reserve is a powerful, though an intangible, asset in an argument; and, on the other hand, the man who has emptied his magazine is in a risky situation.

13.  Sources for Facts.  In the main, there are two kinds of sources for facts, sources in which the facts have already been collected and digested, and sources where they are still scattered and must be brought together and grouped by the investigator.  Obviously there is no sharp or permanent distinction between these two classes.  Let us first run through some of the books which are commonly available as sources of either kind, and then come back to the use of them.

To find material in books and magazines there are certain well-known guides.  To look up books go first to the catalogue of the nearest library.  Here in most cases you will find some sort of subject catalogue, in which the subjects are arranged alphabetically; and if you can use the alphabet readily, as by no means all college students can, you can soon get a list of the books that are there available on the subject.  On many subjects there are bibliographies, or lists of books, such as those published by the Library of Congress; these will be found in every large library.  For articles in magazines and weekly journals, which on most current questions have fresh information, besides a great deal of valuable material on older questions, go to Poole’s “Index to Periodical Literature,” which is an index both by title and subject to the articles in important English and American magazines from 1802 to 1906, and to “The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature,” which began in 1901 and includes more magazines, and which is brought up to date every month.

For other material the works listed below will be serviceable; they are the best known of the reference books, and some of them will be found in all libraries and all of them in large libraries.  The books on this list by no means exhaust the number of good books of their own kind; they are good examples, and others will ordinarily be found on the same shelves with them.

Dictionaries

The new English dictionary (MURRAY’S) Unfinished:  to have ten volumes, of which nine have now been published.  This gives the history of each word for the last seven hundred years, with copious quotations, dated, to show the changes in its use.

The century dictionary, cyclopedia of names, and Atlas New edition, 1911, in twelve volumes.  This has fuller information about the meanings of the words than is usually found in a dictionary.