How to Catalogue a Library

by Henry B. Wheatley

On the Question of Authorship in Academical Dissertations.

In the "title-taking" of these dissertations the difficulty is not in their "subjects," which are sometimes confined even to a single word, but it is in the choice of their authors' names: whether the præses, the respondent, the proponent or defendant is to be chosen. It may perhaps be thought that I am fighting with a shadow, but when it is considered that the seventh of the Rules for Cataloguing printed by the British Museum, copied afterwards into Cutter's Rules, and since, I find, adopted by the Library Association, is that "The Respondent or Defendant of a Thesis is the Author, except when it unequivocally appears to be the work of the Præses," and that nevertheless in some special catalogues, such as Pritzel's Thesaurus, Haller's Bibliothecæ, etc., and in the catalogues of the Linnæan and some other Societies' libraries, the rule has been generally adopted that the præses is the author, or at least that he takes that position from the dissertations being entered under his name—and that in a large number of collections of these dissertations, this latter rule has been frequently favoured—it will be allowed that this shadow puts on a substantial appearance, and has sufficient reality in it to bear a practical discussion. In placing before you some examples from title-pages, in illustration of the question, I must apologize for taking them entirely from works connected with Medicine and its allied sciences, as being the class more immediately ready to my hand for reference.

Before entering on the bibliographical part of our subject, you will allow me to quote, from Watts' On the Improvement of the Mind, a short summary of the method of scholastic disputation: "The tutor appoints a question in some of the sciences to be debated amongst his students; one of them undertakes to affirm or to deny the question and to defend his assertion or negation, and to answer all objections against it; he is called the respondent, and the rest of the students in the same class or who pursue the same science are the opponents, who are appointed to dispute or raise objections against the proposition affirmed or denied. It is the business of the respondent to write a thesis in Latin, or short discourse on the question proposed, and he either affirms or denies the question according to the opinion of the tutor, which is supposed to be the truth, and he reads it at the beginning of the dispute. The opponent, or opponents in succession, make objections in the form of a syllogism, the proposition in which is in reply argued against and denied by the respondent. During this time the tutor sits in the chair as President or Moderator to see that the rules of disputation and decency be observed on both sides. His work is also to illustrate and explain the answer or distinction of the respondent where it is obscure, to strengthen it where it is weak, and to correct it where it is false, and when the respondent is pinched with a strong objection, and is at a loss for an answer, the Moderator assists him and suggests some answer to the objection of the opponent, in defence of the question, according to his own opinion or sentiment."

The latter part of the above quotation seems to be the only ground for attributing an authorship to the præses, viz., that he has had so great a hand in correcting and moulding the form and argument of the essay as to be entitled to the appellation. I cannot understand the thesis being attributed to the præses on any other supposition, but if that supposition be correct, and the præses did give the candidate the information on which his dissertation is compiled, and the candidate had merely the superficial reality of the position as a defender of the statements given in his thesis, would not that circumstance be purely a literary question and a matter for a statement by foot-note? while, as the candidate for honours brings the thesis forward as his own, he must bibliographically be considered its author.

The questions also arise: is the published thesis the original thesis prepared for disputation, or is it in its printed form a combination of that thesis with such corrections and emendations as have been elicited in the discussion? Is it like a paper contributed to our societies, in which the ipsissima verba of the author are retained if the paper is thought generally worthy of publication, in despite of some of its statements having been contravened in the discussion? Is it like a drafted Bill for Parliament, or as amended in committee or by a rival committee, with the chairman's notes of addition and correction? Might not the authorship, if conceded to the præses on these grounds, be given also to a schoolmaster who suggested some of the principal points of the themes for his pupils on which they were to gain honour and distinction; or to a drawing-master, who

"In years gone by, when we were lads at school,"

put some last brilliant touches to our dull, spiritless attempts at imitation; rendering our pencillings liable, in their improved condition, to be declared by some cynical critic, much to our dissatisfaction, more our master's than our own?

In the Dissertationes Inaugurales of the Edinburgh, Leipzig, Goettingen, Berlin, Paris, and other universities, there is little or no difficulty, where the author, A. B. eruditorum examini subjicit, ex auctoritate Rectoris vel Præfecti, as, if we take, for instance, the case of the Edinburgh Dissertations, no one could suppose the hundreds of dissertations submitted for examination by aspirants for academic honours could all be attributed, either to the learned Præfects Drs. Wishart or Wm. Robertson of the last century, or to Dr. Georgius Baird of the first quarter of the present; and one of the difficulties connected with the question is, how far the usual præses in thesis with a respondent, is or is not in almost the same relative position as the rector of the above dissertations, and in fact whether the hundred and one different forms and variations of words on title-pages used in the various cases of rector and candidate for honours, præses and proponent, præses and defendant, defendant alone, præses and respondent, respondent alone, etc., are not all slightly varying representations of much the same condition of things, modified perhaps by some variety of usages, as in Sweden, for instance, which may have been more favourable to the claims of the præses than in other countries; a condition, however, which is a veritable Proteus in its many changes of shape.

Presidents, we allow to be absolute in their decisions, but in the case of these dissertations they are in an "ablative absolute" position, and therefore, I suggest, should, with few exceptions, be removed from the status of author, which belongs grammatically as well as bibliographically to the proponent, defendant, or respondent, who in the nominative case dominates the entire construction of the title-page.

The British Museum rule, as adopted by Mr. Cutter in his Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue and by our Association since, viz., "Consider the Respondent or Defendant of a Thesis as its Author except when it unequivocally appears to be the work of the Præses," does not comprehend cases where both the words respondent and defendant occur together.