OWING

WING to the want of a complete Catalogue, the Library of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society has been hitherto practically inaccessible to the Public. The few students and savantswho were obliged to have recourse to it for their researches—had only for guides the somewhat meagre list of Books and Charts printed in the Council's Report for the year 1865, the manuscript list of the books forming the collection of Mr. Wylie and the memory of the Librarian.

This Catalogue will show the poverty of the Library and probably induce public-spirited men to add to its value by presenting works which they may have thought of no interest or already in the collection. Libraries begin to make real progress only when their contents are well known and their object well determined. Mr. Wylie's Library1 served as the nucleus of a good series of works on China; and its 718 volumes or pamphlets, added to those already in the possession of the Asiatic Society, formed a collection of standard works on the East numbering about 1,300 volumes 2

However valuable this collection may be, its deficiency is very great; and many a volume which an Orientalist ought to find is sought in vain through the pages of the Catalogue. Works of reference, which, whatever is the specialty of a Library, should always have some place on its shelves, are also sadly conspicuous by their absence. Now, that the paucity of our resources is known, no doubt people will come forward

1. The Books belonging to the Wylie Library are designated in the Catalogue by an asterisk *

2. These figures do not include the 1,023 Chinese volumes of Mr. Wylie and the Transactions of learned Societies and Periodical Publications which form one of the most important classes of the Library.

and help us to fill the blanks, unfortunately too numerous.

Let every

one bear in mind that nothing is to be rejected -a pamphlet, a newspaper, nay a handbill, which to the ordinary reader is no more than a valueless paper, may become, in the hands of the searcher,

scrap of

the means of an important discovery.

One word more.

Some notes have been added to the description

of the works-whether they will prove useful will be best judged by those who may have to go through the Catalogue. But in Shanghai, where the saying "Time is Money" is perhaps truer than in any other place in the world, it has been thought that by reference to them much time could be saved. Biographical Dictionaries and Biographical Treatises, Catalogues of Libraries and Booksellers, and especially the Catalogue of Klaproth's Collection, the classification of which has been adopted by the compiler, at least in its principal divisions, supplied the materials for those notes. The divisions will be found perhaps too numerous, but it must not be forgotten that this is only the skeleton of a Library and that some room must be provided for future acquisitions.

H. C.