Classifying Books.
A capital use of numerals to convey information is that devised by Melvil Dewey, formerly State Librarian of New York at Albany. He divides literature into ten great departments, giving each of them one of the ten numerals. History, in this scheme, is represented by 9 as the first figure in the number of a book; the second figure refers to the geographical division to which the work belongs, thus 7 means North America; the third figure standing for the political division treated by the book, 1 representing the British Empire. A work on Canadian history, therefore, will bear as its number, 971.