of literature put together.  The library that is able to show a fiction percentage of 60, points to it with pride, while there are plenty with percentages between 70 and 80.  Now this is all to the credit of the fiction writers.  I refuse to believe that their readers are any more fundamentally interested in the subjects of which they treat than in others.  They simply follow the line of least resistance.  They want something interesting to read and they know from experience where to go for it.  Of course this brings on abuses.  Writers use illegitimate methods to arouse interest—­appeals perhaps, to unworthy instincts.  We need not discuss that here, but simply focus our attention on the fact that writers of fiction always try to be interesting because they must; while writers of history, travel, biography and philosophy do not usually try, because they think it unnecessary.  This is simply a survival.  It used to be true that readers of these subjects read them because of their great antecedent interest in them—­an interest so great that interesting methods of presentation became unnecessary.  No one cared about the masses, still less about what they might or might not read.  Things are changed now; we are trying to advertise stored ideas to persons unfamiliar with them and we are suddenly awakening to the fact that our stock is not all that it should be.  We need history, science and travel fascinatingly presented—­at least as interestingly as the fiction-writer presents his subjects.  This is by no means impossible, because it has been done, in a few instances.  We are by no means in the position of the Irishman who didn’t know whether or not he could play the piano, because he had never tried.  Some of our authors have tried—­and succeeded.  No one after William James can say that philosophy cannot be made interesting to the ordinary reader.  Tyndall showed us long ago that physics could interest the unlearned, and there are similarly interesting writers on history and travel—­more perhaps in these two classes than any other.  But it remains true that the vast majority of non-fiction books do not attract, and were not written with the aim of attracting, the ordinary reader such as the libraries are now trying to reach.  The result is that the fiction writers are usurping the functions of these uninteresting scribes and are putting history, science, economics, biology, medicine—­all sorts of subjects, into fictional form—­a sufficient answer to any who may think that the subjects themselves, as distinguished from the manner in which they are presented, are calculated to repel the ordinary reader.  Fiction is thus becoming, if it has not already become, the sole form of literary expression, so far as the ordinary reader is concerned.  This is interesting; it justifies the large stock of fiction in public libraries and the large circulation of that stock.  It does not follow that it is commendable or desirable.  For one thing it places truth and