This idea has long been working in the minds of scholars, and all who have had occasion to follow out any special subject.  I have a right to speak of it, for I long ago attempted to supply the want of indexes in some small measure for my own need.  I had a very complete set of the “American Journal of the Medical Sciences;” an entire set of the “North American Review,” and many volumes of the reprints of the three leading British quarterlies.  Of what use were they to me without general indexes?  I looked them all through carefully and made classified lists of all the articles I thought I should most care to read.  But they soon outgrew my lists.  The “North American Review” kept filling up shelf after shelf, rich in articles which I often wanted to consult, but what a labor to find them, until the index of Mr. Gushing, published a few months since, made the contents of these hundred and twenty volumes as easily accessible as the words in a dictionary!  I had a, copy of good Dr. Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia, a treasure-house to my boyhood which has not lost its value for me in later years.  But where to look for what I wanted?  I wished to know, for instance, what Dr. Burney had to say about singing.  Who would have looked for it under the Italian word cantare?  I was curious to learn something of the etchings of Rembrandt, and where should I find it but under the head “Low Countries, Engravers of the,”—­an elaborate and most valuable article of a hundred double-columned close-printed quarto pages, to which no reference, even, is made under the title Rembrandt.

There was nothing to be done, if I wanted to know where that which I specially cared for was to be found in my Rees’s Cyclopaedia, but to look over every page of its forty-one quarto volumes and make out a brief list of matters of interest which I could not find by their titles, and this I did, at no small expense of time and trouble.

Nothing, therefore, could be more pleasing to me than to see the attention which has been given of late years to the great work of indexing.  It is a quarter of a century since Mr. Poole published his “Index to Periodical Literature,” which it is much to be hoped is soon to appear in a new edition, grown as it must be to formidable dimensions by the additions of so long a period.  The “British and Foreign Medical Review,” edited by the late Sir John Forties, contributed to by Huxley, Carpenter, Laycock, and others of the most distinguished scientific men of Great Britain, has an index to its twenty-four volumes, and by its aid I find this valuable series as manageable as a lexicon.  The last edition of the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” had a complete index in a separate volume, and the publishers of Appletons’ “American Cyclopaedia” have recently issued an index to their useful work, which must greatly add to its value.  I have already referred to the index to the “North American Review,” which to an American, and especially to a New Englander, is the most interesting and most