The writers of the obituary notices of Sir William Osler were strangely silent as to the love of books which was one of his most marked characteristics, and this although in Who's Who? he had put down "Bibliography" as his only "Recreation," and at the time of his death had been President of the Bibliographical Society for seven years, nearly three times as long as any of his predecessors. In the true spirit of humanism his interest in bibliography was first aroused by the books relating to his own profession, and widened out from this to a fine catholicity. Within a year of his coming to England he delivered an address on Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici before the Physical Society of Guy's Hospital (printed in The Library for January, 1906), and he was never tired of singing the praise of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy as "a great medical treatise (the greatest ever written by a layman), orderly in arrangement, intensely serious in purpose, and weighty beyond belief in authorities." The quotation comes from a paper he read before the Bibliographical Society on The Library of Robert Burton in November, 1909, in which he gave a summarised account of the 580 books of Burton's preserved at the Bodleian and the 429 in the library at Christ Church. Unless we are mistaken, the picking out of these books, and the grouping those at Christ Church round a portrait of Burton, copied from the original in Brasenose College, was due mainly to his initiative. He certainly took a keen interest in both libraries, was an enthusiastic curator of the Bodleian, and a generous supporter of the admirable Bodleian Quarterly, started by Mr. Falconer Madan. A paper he contributed to this on the Bookworm, illustrated by an admirable coloured plate exhibiting it in all its stages, is by far the best study of that elusive "worm" ever printed.
After he became President of the Bibliographical Society he gave another stimulating address on the medical books printed before the close of the year 1480, its object being "to get an idea of the mental attitude of the profession of medicine from the character of the books printed." He had then been working on this subject for some time, and even amid the countless activities into which he threw himself during the war did not wholly neglect it. The description of the books was practically finished some time ago; whether the introduction, in which he aimed at clothing the bibliographical skeleton with flesh and blood, had been written is not yet known. He had over forty medical books of the fifteenth century in his own collection, and was forming a specialist library to illustrate the history of science, and of medicine in particular, on a strikingly original plan. Its completion should have been the occupation of a leisurely old age, but he loved his fellows too well to give himself any leisure, and left this for others to complete.
We welcome from America the first number of the new Dial. The Dial was founded at Chicago in 1880 by Francis F. Browne. Until a few years ago it remained in the Browne family, who produced fortnightly a paper, sober, academic, and informative, somewhat resembling our Athenæum of Victorian days. A few years ago the paper changed hands: its offices were shifted to New York, and it has been at one time primarily an organ of rebellious literary youth, and at another a Radical political journal. The latest remodelling promises stability. The Dial appears as a purely literary and artistic monthly, in shape like one of our own monthly reviews, and typographically superior to most of them. We await its development with interest.