Abstract
WHEN the Goths overran Greece, so Montaigne relates, “the only thing that preserved all the libraries from the fire was, that someone possessed them with an opinion that they were to leave this kind of furniture entire to the enemy, as being most proper to divert them from the exercise of arms and to fix them to a lazy and sedentary life”. Although an author and a ‘bookworm’, Montaigne himself confessed that he preferred the stimulus of conversation and debate to the “languishing and feeble motion” of the study of books, of which incidentally he too had seen examples “made of things that were never either studied or understood”. One wonders how the Goths would have behaved, or what classical tag the French essayist would have quoted, had either been invited to catalogue, arrange, and house, if never to use, only that portion of the scientific literature of the nineteen-twenties that is generally admitted to be of permanent value. It is, however, idle to prophesy, for has not Mr. Belloc told us that a prophecy (when it is scientific) is always and invariably absolutely and totally wrong?
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Scientific Books and Libraries. Nature 124, 505–506 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/124505a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/124505a0