When we distribute books, then, we distribute ideas, not only actual, but potential. A book has in it not only the ideas that lie on its surface, but millions of others that are tied to these by invisible chords, of which we have touched on but a few—the invisible ancestral memories of centuries ago, the foretastes of future thoughts in our older selves and our posterity of centuries hence. When we think of it, it is hard to realize that a book has not a soul.
Gerald Stanley Lee, in his latest book, a collection of essays on millionaires, sneers at the efforts of the rich mill owners to improve their employees by means of libraries. Life in a modern mill, he thinks, is so mechanical as to dull all the higher faculties. “Andrew Carnegie,” he says (and he apparently uses the name merely as that of a type), “has been taking men’s souls away and giving them paper books.”
Now the mills may be soul-deadening—possibly they are, though it is hard to benumb a soul—but I will venture to say that for every soul that Mr. Carnegie, or anyone else, has taken away, he has created, awakened and stimulated a thousand by contact with that almost soul—that near-soul—that resides in books. Mr. Lee’s books may be merely paper; mine have paper and ink only for their outer garb; their inner warp and woof is of the texture of spirit.
This is why I rejoice when a new library is opened. I thank God for its generous donor. I clasp hands with the far-reaching municipality that accepts and supports it. I wish good luck to the librarians who are to care for it and give it dynamic force; I congratulate the public whose privilege it is to use it and to profit by it.
[Simon Newcomb: America’s Foremost Astronomer]
Among those in all parts of the world whose good opinion is worth having, Simon Newcomb was one of the best known of America’s great men. Astronomer, mathematician, economist, novelist, he had well-nigh boxed the compass of human knowledge, attaining eminence such as is given to few to reach, at more than one of its points. His fame was of the far-reaching kind,—penetrating to remote regions, while that of some others has only created a noisy disturbance within a narrow radius.
Best and most widely known as an astronomer, his achievements in that science were not suited for sensational exploitation. He discovered no apple-orchards on the moon, neither did he dispute regarding the railways on the planet Venus. His aim was to make still more exact our knowledge of the motions of the bodies constituting what we call the solar system, and his labors toward this end, begun more than thirty years ago, he continued almost until the day of his death. Conscious that his span of life was measured by months and in the grip of what he knew to be a fatal disease, he yet exerted himself with all his remaining energy to complete his monumental work on the motion of the moon, and succeeded in bringing it to an end before the final summons came. His last days thus had in them a cast of the heroic, not less than if, as the commander of a torpedoed battleship, he had gone down with her, or than if he had fallen charging at the head of a forlorn hope. It is pleasant to think that such a man was laid to rest with military honors. The accident that he was a retired professor in the United States Navy may have been the immediate cause of this, but its appropriateness lies deeper.
Newcomb saw the light not under the Stars and Stripes, but in Nova Scotia, where he was born, at the town of Wallace on March 12, 1835. His father, a teacher, was of American descent, his ancestors having settled in Canada in 1761. After studying with his father and teaching for some little time in his native province he came to the United States while yet a boy of eighteen, and while teaching in Maryland in 1854-‘56 was so fortunate as to attract, by his mathematical ability, the attention of two eminent American scientific men, Joseph Henry and Julius Hilgard, who secured him an appointment as computer on the Nautical Almanac. The date of this was 1857, and Newcomb had thus, at his death, been in Government employ for fifty-two years. As the work of the almanac was then carried on in Cambridge, Mass., he was enabled to enter the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University, where he graduated in 1858 and where he pursued graduate studies for three years longer. On their completion in 1861 he was appointed a professor of mathematics in the United States Navy, which office he held till his death. This appointment, made when he was twenty-six years old,—scarcely more than a boy,—is a striking testimony to his remarkable ability as a mathematician, for of practical astronomy he still knew little.