well nigh impossible.  But many hands make light work.  An “Index Society” has been formed in England, already numbering about one hundred and seventy members.  It aims at “supplying thorough indexes to valuable works and collections which have hitherto lacked them; at issuing indexes to the literature of special subjects; and at gathering materials for a general reference index.”  This society has published a little treatise setting forth the history and the art of indexing, which I trust is in the hands of some of our members, if not upon our shelves.

Something has been done in the same direction by individuals in our own country, as we have already seen.  The need of it in the department of medicine is beginning to be clearly felt.  Our library has already an admirable catalogue with cross references, the work of a number of its younger members cooperating in the task.  A very intelligent medical student, Mr. William D. Chapin, whose excellent project is indorsed by well-known New York physicians and professors, proposes to publish a yearly index to original communications in the medical journals of the United States, classified by authors and subjects.  But it is from the National Medical Library at Washington that we have the best promise and the largest expectations.  That great and growing collection of fifty thousand volumes is under the eye and hand of a librarian who knows books and how to manage them.  For libraries are the standing armies of civilization, and an army is but a mob without a general who can organize and marshal it so as to make it effective.  The “Specimen Fasciculus of a Catalogue of the National Medical Library,” prepared under the direction of Dr. Billings, the librarian, would have excited the admiration of Haller, the master scholar in medical science of the last century, or rather of the profession in all centuries, and if carried out as it is begun will be to the nineteenth all and more than all that the three Bibliothecae—­Anatomica, Chirurgica, and Medicinae-Practicae—­were to the eighteenth century.  I cannot forget the story that Agassiz was so fond of telling of the king of Prussia and Fichte.  It was after the humiliation and spoliation of the kingdom by Napoleon that the monarch asked the philosopher what could be done to regain the lost position of the nation.  “Found a great university, Sire,” was the answer, and so it was that in the year 1810 the world-renowned University of Berlin came into being.  I believe that we in this country can do better than found a national university, whose professors shall be nominated in caucuses, go in and out, perhaps, like postmasters, with every change of administration, and deal with science in the face of their constituency as the courtier did with time when his sovereign asked him what o’clock it was:  “Whatever hour your majesty pleases.”  But when we have a noble library like that at Washington, and a librarian of exceptional qualifications like the gentleman who now holds that office, I believe