COLLEGE LIBRARIES.

College Libraries form the subject of a little discourse in the Boston Post : "The time of year is close at hand when a great many hundred young men and women will enter upon college life ; almost as many more will leave it, and a still greater number will advance a stage upon the real or apparent path of knowledge. A word of advice may not be out of place, at least to those who are yet this side, of their journey's end so far as a college diploma constitutes the goal. There is a too prevalent idea in the minds of young people that education is an affair of routine, that the sum of their duties lies in a general mastery of the text-books provided, promptness in recitations and at lectures, if there happen to be any, and good lessons when called upon to recite. It should be the office of professors and teachers to dispel this erroneous or rather imperfect conception of the means and methods by which an education is to be obtained ; but on the contrary they too often encourage it, because it makes their recitations appear to advantage and saves trouble. It is a lamentable fact, however, that the men in college who are called the best scholars have frequently remarkably poorly furnished minds when they get through. Studying for standing is dangerous. It economizes the mental forces to an undue extent, and withdraws them from that expansive bed they are inclined to seek in order to concentrate them in a narrow channel wherein flows the current of their routine duties and shallow ambition. The routine work of a college is worth little except to suggest and direct to broader fields of study. For that the library affords the opportunity. The student should reinforce his prescribed work with judicious and extensive reading. He should read around all the subjects that come before him in the regular course of his study, so far as possible, and he will experience gratifying surprise, if his thirst for knowledge is genuine, in finding how much more communion with many minds regarding a single manifestation of truth will do for him, than an unqualified reliance upon the unsupported opinion of one. A man who follows this method will find his collegiate course a much more profitable one, than he who sacrifices all for the coveted 'marks.' He may even make frequent failures in the class-room where the other makes none and yet be his superior at the end of four years in all that equips a man for the stern realities that await him in life's battle.