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LIBRARIES OF THE WORLD CONTAINING 100,000 VOLUMES OR UPWARDS AT LATEST DATES.*

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76.. Paris.

78.. Philadelphia..

66

66

79..

Parma..

Italy.

80.. Prague..

81.. Rome.

Austria..
Italy.

65.. Naples.

66.. New Haven

67. New York.

68..

New York.

United States.. Yale College..

Italy..

National.

200,000 1780

105,000 1700

66

66

Astor

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150,000 1849

160,000 1820

330,000 1598

University.
National.

Arsenal.

St. Genevieve..

Sorbonne.

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Mazarin..

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77.. Philadelphia.. United States.. Library Co. of Phila.

Mercantile.

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Public...

140,000

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THE CURIOSITIES OF STATISTICS.

THE American people, like their European ancestry, may be said to have a passion for facts. They instinctively demand the basis upon which every statement rests, and all things must show their reason for being. The statistics of every art, trade, and manufacture are sought for with interest and swallowed with avidity. Sometimes we are reproached for our overweening taste for romance, and our vast consumption of books of fiction; but the demand for books of fact, the steady and enormous sale of encyclopædias, dictionaries, and popular scientific books, is something far in advance of what is common in other nations, and evinces the popular taste for the solid and the practical. No people in the world hunt so eagerly after precedents as the Americans, and it is only candid to add, that no people, when found, so systematically disregard them.

Next to a Bible and a dictionary of language, there is no book perhaps more common than a biographical dictionary. Our interest in our fellow-men is perennial; and we seek to know not only their characteristics, and the distinguishing events of their lives, but also the time of their birth into the world and their exit from it. This is a species of statistics upon which one naturally expects certainty, since no person eminent enough to be recorded at all is likely to have had the epoch of his death, at least, unremarked. Yet the seeker after exact information in the biographical dictionaries will find, if he extends his quest among various authorities, that he is afloat on a sea of uncertainties. Not only can he not find out the date of decease of navigators like Sir John Franklin and La Perouse, who sailed into the unexplored regions of the globe, and were never heard of more, save by the finding of a few traces where they perished, but the men who died at home, in the midst of friends and families, are frequently recorded as deceased at dates so discrepant that no ingenuity can reconcile them. In Haydn's Dictionary of Dates, Sir Henry Havelock is said to have died November 25th, 1857, while Maunder's Treasury of Biography gives November 21st, the London Almanac November 27th, and the Life of Havelock, by his brother-inlaw, November 24th. Here are four distinct dates of death given, by

authorities equally accredited, to a famous general, who died within twenty years. Of the death of the notorious Robespierre, guillotined in 1794, we find in Chalmers' Biographical Dictionary that he died July 10th, in Rees' Cyclopædia, July 28th, and in Alison's History of Europe, July 29th. Doubtless it is some comfort to reflect, in view of his many crimes, that the bloody tyrant of the Jacobins is really dead, irrespective of the date, about which biographers may dispute. Of the English mechanician Joseph Bramah, inventor of the Bramalı lock, we learn from the English Cyclopædia that he died in 1814, and from Rose's Biographical Dictionary that he died in 1815.

Now, although a large share of the errors and discrepancies that abound in biographical dictionaries and other books of reference may be accounted for by misprints, others by reckoning old style instead of new, or vice versa, and many more by the carelessness of editors and transcribers, it is plain that all the variations cannot thus be accounted for. Nothing is more common in printing-offices than to find a figure 6 inverted serving as a 9, a 5 for a 3, or a 3 for an 8, while 8, 9, and 0 are frequently interchanged. In such cases, a lynx-eyed proof-reader may not always be present to prevent the falsification of history; and it is a fact not sufficiently recognized, that to the untiring vigilance, intelligence, and hard conscientious labors of proofreaders, the world owes a deeper debt of gratitude than it does to many a famous maker of books. It is easy enough, Heaven knows, to make books, but to make them correct, Hic labor, hoc opus est.

A high authority in encyclopædical lore tells us that the best accredited authorities are at odds with regard to the birth or death of individuals in the enormous ratio of from twenty to twenty-five per cent of the whole number in the biographical dictionaries. The Portuguese poet Camoens is said by some authorities to have been born in 1517, and by others in 1525. Chateaubriand is declared by the English Cyclopædia to have been born September 4th, 1768; September 14th, 1768, by the Nouvelle Biographie générale of Dr. Hoefer; and September 4th, 1769, by the Conversations-Lexicon. Of course it is clear that all these authorities cannot be right, but which of the three is so, is matter of extreme doubt, leaving the student of facts perplexed and uncertain at the very point where certainty is not only most important, but most confidently expected.

Of another kind are the errors that sometimes creep into works of reference of high credit, by accepting too confidently statements publicly made. In one edition of the Dictionary of Congress a certain honorable member from Pennsylvania, in uncommonly robust health, was astonished to find himself recorded as having died of the National Hotel disease, contracted at Washington in 1856. In this case the editor of the work was the victim of too much confidence in the newspapers. In the Congressional Directory, where brief biographies of Congressmen are given, one distinguished member was printed as hav

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