Various

“ LIBRARIES. A library (from Lat. liber, book) , in the modern sense, is a collection of printed or written literature. As such, it implies an advanced and elaborate civilization. If the term be extended to any considerable collection of written documents, it must be nearly as old as civilization itself. The earliest use to which the invention of inscribed or written signs was put was probably to record important religious and political transactions. ”

“ Indeed, as he himself said afterwards, it was a wretched time for chemistry in Germany. No laboratories were accessible to ordinary students, who had to content themselves with what the universities could give in the lecture-room and the library, and though both at Bonn and Erlangen Liebig endeavoured to make up for the deficiencies of the official instruction by founding a students’ physical and chemical society for the discussion of new discoveries and speculations, he felt that he could never become a chemist in his own country. ”

“ As the former centre of civilization, Italy is, of course, the country in which the oldest existing libraries must be looked for, and in which the rarest and most valuable MSS. are preserved. The Vatican at Rome and the Laurentian Library at Florence are sufficient in themselves to entitle Italy to rank before most other states in that respect, and the venerable relics at Vercelli, Monte Cassino and La Cava bear witness to the enlightenment of the peninsula while other nations were slowly taking their places in the circle of Christian polity. ”

“ The real distinction between living matter and inorganic matter is chemical. Living substance always contains proteid, and although we know that proteid contains only common inorganic elements, we know neither how these are combined to form proteid, nor any way in which proteid can be brought into existence except in the presence of previously existing proteid. The central position of the problem of life lies in the chemistry of proteid, and until that has been fully explored, we are unable to say that there is any problem of life behind the problem of proteid. ”

“ But where else shall we find the equals of the military scenes in O’Malley and Tom Burke, or the military episodes in Jack Hinton, Arthur O’Leary (the story of Aubuisson) or Maurice Tiernay (nothing he ever did is finer than the chapter introducing “A remnant of Fontenoy”) ? It is here that his true genius lies, even more than in his talent for conviviality and fun, which makes an early copy of an early Lever (with Phiz’s illustrations) seem literally to exhale an atmosphere of past and present entertainment. It is here that he is a true romancist, not for boys only, but also for men. ”

“ LIFE, the popular name for the activity peculiar to protoplasm (q.v.) . This conception has been extended by analogy to phenomena different in kind, such as the activities of masses of water or of air, or of machinery, or by another analogy, to the duration of a composite structure, and by imagination to real or supposed phenomena such as the manifestations of incorporeal entities. From the point of view of exact science life is associated with matter, is displayed only by living bodies, by all living bodies, and is what distinguishes living bodies from bodies that are not alive. ”

“ New Hypotheses in the Corpuscular Theory.—The preceding explanation of reflection and refraction is open to a very serious objection. If the particles in a beam of light all moved with the same velocity and were acted on by the same forces, they all ought to follow exactly the same path. In order to understand that part of the incident light is reflected and part of it transmitted, Newton imagined that each corpuscle undergoes certain alternating changes; he assumed that in some of its different “phases” it is more apt to be reflected, and in others more apt to be transmitted. ”

“ To suggest and to stimulate the mind, rather than to supply it with any complete system of knowledge, may be said to be Lewes’s service in philosophy. The exceptional rapidity and versatility of his intelligence seems to account at once for the freshness in his way of envisaging the subject-matter of philosophy and psychology, and for the want of satisfactory elaboration and of systematic co-ordination. ”

“ Each several system of law requires to be studied on the point; but, speaking generally, apart from the possessory lien of workmen and the maritime lien of the vice-admiralty courts, it may be assumed that the rules of the civil law, giving a privilege or priority in certain specified cases rather than a lien as understood in English law, prevail in those colonies where the English law is not in force. ”

“ Theory of Huygens.—Huygens was the first to show that the explanation of optical phenomena may be made to depend on the wave-surface, not only in isotropic bodies, in which it has a spherical form, but also in crystals, for one of which (Iceland spar) he deduced the form of the surface from the observed double refraction. In his argument Huygens availed himself of the following principle that is justly named after him: Any point that is reached by a wave of light becomes a new centre of radiation from which the disturbance is propagated towards all sides. ”

“ The aversion of the Greek thinkers to detailed experimental inquiry stultified the progress of the science; instead of acquiring facts necessary for formulating scientific laws and correcting hypotheses, the Greeks devoted their intellectual energies to philosophizing on the nature of light itself. In their search for a theory the Greeks were mainly concerned with vision—in other words, they sought to determine how an object was seen, and to what its colour was due. Emission theories, involving the conception that light was a stream of concrete particles, were formulated. ”

“ Comparison of living and lifeless organic matter presents the initial difficulty that we cannot draw an exact line between a living and a dead organism. The higher “warm-blooded” creatures appear to present the simplest case and in their life-history there seems to be a point at which we can say “that which was alive is now dead.” We judge from some major arrest of activity, as when the heart ceases to beat. ”

“ Both ideas, or both modes of expressing what is fundamentally the same idea, have this in common, that life is not a sum of the qualities of the chemical elements contained in protoplasm, but a function first of the peculiar architecture of the mixture, and then of the high complexity of the compounds contained in the mixture. The qualities of water are no sum of the qualities of oxygen and hydrogen, and still less can we expect to explain the qualities of life without regard to the immense complexity of the living substance. ”

“ In most of the European countries and in the United States libraries of all kinds have during the last twenty years been undergoing a process of development and improvement which has greatly altered their policy and methods. At one time libraries were regarded almost entirely as repositories for the storage of books to be used by the learned alone, but now they are coming to be regarded more and more as workshops or as places for intellectual recreation adapted for every department of life. ”

“ Few libraries in the United States equal either in number or value the American books in the museum. The collection of Slavonic literature, due to the initiative of Thomas Watts, is also a remarkable feature. Indeed, in cosmopolitan interest the museum is without a rival in the world, possessing as it does the best library in any European language out of the territory in which the language is vernacular. The Hebrew, the Chinese, and printed books in other Oriental languages are important and represented in large numbers. ”

“ While the old schools of the rhetoricians died out new monasteries arose everywhere. Knowledge was no longer pursued for its own sake, but became subsidiary to religious and theological teaching. The proscription of the old classical literature, which is symbolized in the fable of the destruction of the Palatine library by Gregory the Great, was only too effectual. The Gregorian tradition of opposition to pagan learning long continued to dominate the literary pursuits of the monastic orders and the labours of the scriptorium. ”

“ Philosophy is not a mere extension of scientific knowledge; it is an investigation of the nature and validity of the knowing process itself. In any case Lewes cannot be said to have done much to aid in the settlement of properly philosophical questions. His whole treatment of the question of the relation of subject to object is vitiated by a confusion between the scientific truth that mind and body coexist in the living organism and the philosophic truth that all knowledge of objects implies a knowing subject. ”

“ It follows, therefore, that in a large class of executory contracts express and implied, which the common law regards as creating no property, right nor interest analogous to property, but only a mere personal right to obligation, equity recognizes in addition to the personal obligation a particular right over the thing with which the contract deals, which it calls a lien, and which though not property is analogous to property, and by means of which the plaintiff is enabled to follow the identical thing and to enforce the defendant’s obligation by a remedy which operates directly on the thing. ”

“ It must be borne in mind that the exact nutritive relations of the two constituents of the lichen have not been completely elucidated, and that it is very difficult to draw the line between symbiosis and parasitism. The lichen algae are not alone in their specialization to the symbiotic (or parasitic) mode of life, for, as stated earlier, the fungus appear in the majority of cases to have completely lost the power of independent development since with very rare exceptions they are not found alone. They also differ very markedly from free living fungi in their chemical reactions. ”

“ Herbert Spencer’s formula that life is “the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations” was the result of a profound and subtle analysis, but omits the fundamental consideration that we know life only as a quality of and in association with living matter.
In developing our conception we must discard from consideration the complexities that arise from the organization of the higher living bodies, the differences between one living animal and another, or between plant and animal. ”

“ Again, an acceptance of security for a debt is inconsistent with the existence of a lien, as it substitutes the credit of the owner for the material guarantee of the thing itself, and so acts as a waiver of the lien. ”

“ Polarization phenomena may, with great justification, be regarded as the most engrossing subject of optical research during the 19th century; the assiduity with which it was cultivated in the opening decades of that century received a great stimulus when James Nicol devised in 1828 the famous “Nicol prism,” which greatly facilitated the determination of the plane of vibration of polarized light, and the facts that light is polarized by reflection, repeated refractions, double refraction and by diffraction also contributed to the interest which the subject excited. ”

“ Excellent work has been accomplished within recent years by the Library Association in the training of librarians, and it is usual for about 300 candidates to come forward annually for examination in literary history, bibliography, classification, cataloguing, library history and library routine for which subjects certificates and diplomas are awarded. The profession of municipal librarian is not by any means remunerative as compared with employment in teaching or in the Civil Service, and until the library rate is increased there is little hope of improvement. ”

“ If there were a difference of 10 minutes in the time at which light from the two ends of the visible spectrum arrived, it would be shown by this test. As not the slightest effect of the kind has ever been seen, it seems certain that the difference, if any, cannot approximate to 1⁄1.000.000 part of the entire speed. The case is different when light passes through a refracting medium. It is a theoretical result of the undulatory theory of light that its velocity in such a medium is inversely proportional to the refractive index of the medium. ”

“ The simplest subjective phenomena of light are Colour and intensity, the measurement of the latter being named Photometry. When light falls on a medium, it may be returned by Reflection or it may suffer Absorption; or it may be transmitted and undergo Refraction, and, if the light be composite, Dispersion; or, as in the case of oil films on water, brilliant colours are seen, an effect which is due to Interference. ”

“ It may be argued on the one hand that towage is only a modified form of salvage, and therefore entitled to a maritime lien, and on the other that it is only a form of necessary power supplied like a new sail or mast to a ship to enable her to complete her voyage expeditiously, and therefore of the nature of necessaries, and as such not entitled to a maritime lien. ”

“ In the theory of double refraction the difficulties are no less serious. As a general rule there are in an anisotropic elastic solid three possible directions of vibration (§ 6) , at right angles to each other, for a given direction of the waves, but none of these lies in the wave-front. In order to make two of them do so and to find Fresnel’s form for the wave-surface, new hypotheses are required. On Fresnel’s assumption it is even necessary, as was observed by Green, to suppose that in the absence of all vibrations there is already a certain state of pressure in the medium. ”

“ He founded Durham College at Oxford, and equipped it with a library a hundred years before Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, made his benefaction of books to the university. The taste for secular literature, and the enthusiasm for the ancient classics, gave a fresh direction to the researches of collectors. A disposition to encourage literature began to show itself amongst the great. This was most notable amongst the Italian princes. Cosimo de’ Medici formed a library at Venice while living there in exile in 1433, and on his return to Florence laid the foundation of the great Medicean library. ”

“ Descartes attacked Fermat’s opinions respecting light, but Leibnitz zealously defended them; and Huygens was led, by reasonings of a very different kind, to adopt Fermat’s conclusions of a velocity inversely as the index, and of a minimum time of propagation of light, in passing from one given point to another through an ordinary refracting plane. Newton, however, by his theory of emission and attraction, was led to conclude that the velocity of light was directly, not inversely, as the index, and that it was increased instead of being diminished on entering a denser medium ”

“ There is a special school, the Carnegie Library training school for children’s librarians, at Pittsburg, and within recent years the instruction has included the art of telling stories to children at the libraries. This “story-hour” idea has been the cause of considerable discussion in the United States, librarians and teachers being divided in opinion as to the value of the service. The chief factors in children’s work in American libraries, often overlooked by critics, are the number of non-English reading adults and the large number of children of foreign origin. ”

“ The honour of establishing the first modern public library in Italy had been already secured by Niccolo Niccoli, who left his library of over 800 volumes for the use of the public on his death in 1436. Frederick, duke of Urbino, collected all the writings in Greek and Latin which he could procure, and we have an interesting account of his collection written by his first librarian, Vespasiano. The ardour for classical studies led to those active researches for the Latin writers who were buried in the monastic libraries which are especially identified with the name of Poggio. ”

“ Physical optics, on the other hand, has for its ultimate object the elucidation of the question: what is light? It investigates the nature of the rays themselves, and, in addition to determining the validity of the axioms of geometrical optics, embraces phenomena for the explanation of which an expansion of these assumptions is necessary. ”

“ His first care was to persuade the Darmstadt government to provide a chemical laboratory in which the students might obtain a proper practical training. This laboratory, unique of its kind at the time, in conjunction with Liebig’s unrivalled gifts as a teacher, soon rendered Giessen the most famous chemical school in the world; men flocked from every country to enjoy its advantages, and many of the most accomplished chemists of the 19th century had to thank it for their early training. ”