valuable addition of its kind to our literary apparatus since the publication of Mr. Allibone’s “Dictionary of Authors.”  I might almost dare to parody Mr. Webster’s words in speaking of Hamilton, to describe what Mr. Gushing did for the solemn rows of back volumes of our honored old Review which had been long fossilizing on our shelves:  “He touched the dead corpse of the ‘North American,’ and it sprang to its feet.”  A library of the best thought of the best American scholars during the greater portion of the century was brought to light by the work of the indexmaker as truly as were the Assyrian tablets by the labors of Layard.

A great portion of the best writing and reading literary, scientific, professional, miscellaneous—­comes to us now, at stated intervals, in paper covers.  The writer appears, as it were, in his shirt-sleeves.  As soon as he has delivered his message the book-binder puts a coat on his back, and he joins the forlorn brotherhood of “back volumes,” than which, so long as they are unindexed, nothing can be more exasperating.  Who wants a lock without a key, a ship without a rudder, a binnacle without a compass, a check without a signature, a greenback without a goldback behind it?

I have referred chiefly to the medical journals, but I would include with these the reports of medical associations, and those separate publications which, coming in the form of pamphlets, heap themselves into chaotic piles and bundles which are worse than useless, taking up a great deal of room, and frightening everything away but mice and mousing antiquarians, or possibly at long intervals some terebrating specialist.

Arranged, bound, indexed, all these at once become accessible and valuable.  I will take the first instance which happens to suggest itself.  How many who know all about osteoblasts and the experiments of Ollier, and all that has grown out of them, know where to go for a paper by the late Dr. A. L. Peirson of Salem, published in the year 1840, under the modest title, Remarks on Fractures?  And if any practitioner who has to deal with broken bones does not know that most excellent and practical essay, it is a great pity, for it answers very numerous questions which will be sure to suggest themselves to the surgeon and the patient as no one of the recent treatises, on my own shelves, at least, can do.

But if indexing is the special need of our time in medical literature, as in every department of knowledge, it must be remembered that it is not only an immense labor, but one that never ends.  It requires, therefore, the cooperation of a large number of individuals to do the work, and a large amount of money to pay for making its results public through the press.  When it is remembered that the catalogue of the library of the British Museum is contained in nearly three thousand large folios of manuscript, and not all its books are yet included, the task of indexing any considerable branch of science or literature looks as if it were