In Litteris Libertas                                 3

address, "In Litteris Libertas." However I may seem to wander
here and there, I hope you may feel the play of this melody
throughout—the Libraries as beacons of freedom, leading us on
to the pursuit of knowledge through the inviting highways and
bypaths of the Liberal Arts. And I would also sound a note to
remind us of Columbia as a treasure house of things peculiarly
representatixe of the American scene and of our beloved City of
New York.

One of the favorite rhetorical devices of our old friend Marcus
Tullius Cicero was the "praeteritio." He would say, in effect, "I
pass by this or that," but in doing so he brought pleasure to those
who heard him, by the interesting matter in his seeming digres¬
sions, while at the same time driving his main theme home, on
the bias, as it were. So we turn to digression number one.

With fire, floods and hurricanes, to say nothing of the care¬
lessness and destructiveness of mankind in general, it seems al¬
most a miracle that any of the priceless original books of centuries
ago should still survive, with their artistic embellishments of illus¬
tration, illumination, bindings and exquisite papyrus, vellum, paper
and miscellaneous fittings. I need not refer to the effect of the
bombing of Cassino and of London and a host of other places
in the recent war or of the atom bombs and intercontinental
missiles of the future that we hear so much about. I remember
once reading in Hazlitt's History of the Venetian Republic how
Petrarch, who had a marvelous collection of medieval books and
manuscripts, "was in perpetual dread of losing his treasures by
some unlucky fire, by damp, or by dry-out." So he gave the col¬
lection to the Republic. But after a hundred years or so all were
gone, except a half dozen items, including a Twelfth Century
French missal. Think of the wilful, criminal destruction of the
archives of the churches and monasteries and of many civil estab¬
lishments in Cromwell's time. I had a taste of this sort of thing
myself when my library at Westhampton, Long Island, with all
my notes and memoranda, and even a few incunabula, was washed
away in the hurricane of September 21, 1938.