At the outset it should be said that the importance of this study of beginnings is in every science quite out of proportion to the importance of the objects studied. Beginnings are by nature small. The highest and best things are by nature the most complex and latest, but the study of the earliest and simplest libraries, like the study of the simplest cell life, is not only useful from several points of view but vital to a right understanding of the more complex. The great vice of technical education of all sorts is its tendency to fix attention on the latest and best only. It is true of course that man’s ideas and methods are an evolution—just as his body is. The fact of the accumulation of human experience is the central significant fact of human civilization. It is the glory of libraries that by reason of this fact they are an indispensable tool of progress in civilization. On the whole, by and large, the latest ideas are in fact best, for they tend to sum up in themselves the total of the useful variations of all preceding ideas, and the main time and attention of a course of education must of necessity therefore be given to the latest and best experience, because it does sum up all that has gone before. This does not, however, lessen the value of the study of earlier ideas on any subject back to the very beginnings, for at any given time and place, the latest idea or method in any field is not necessarily the best. It might be the best: it is in position to build on all previous experience and so become best. We all know, however, that the latest book on a subject is not always the best book. So it is, too, of individual ideas or methods.

This frequent failure of the latest to be best comes chiefly from lack of knowledge of previous experience. Every year sees library methods put in operation which were tried and found wholly wanting in the last century or it may be, two, three or even five thousand years ago. On the other hand again, every now and then we find that some method or idea, discovered long ago but neglected meantime, is far better than those in common use. This has often been true of great scientific ideas and we have in Mendelism a striking recent example. One must needs therefore study earlier ideas in any field, both in order to be sure that so-called new ideas are not exploded old ones and in order to find whether common practice in any field at a given time is not really the development of an inferior line of evolution.

And, again, from the point of view of science, this study of earlier stages is useful because the simple things are often the best interpreters of more complex, the early of the late, and it is the vision of the whole in perspective to the very beginning which gives the clue to the real meaning of the latest. “Students have come to realize,” says Professor Stewart Paton (in the Popular Science Magazine 8,1912,166), “that in the ... amoeba, jelly-fish, crab or fish, is to be found the key that will eventually open the book ... (of) the most complex psychic manifestations.” This is true also of libraries—the oldest, smallest and rudest give a clue to the more complex, and it may be added, parenthetically, the library is itself in fact the most complex psychic manifestation in the objective Universe.

Beginnings thus, though small, are the roots of the matter. This is so well recognized in the field of science as to have become an axiom, and in the study of any class of things nowadays the aim is to trace each kind of thing—plant, animal, idea or social institution back to its beginning. Evolution has taught us to expect a genealogical series back and back to very simple forms and the method of all science has become what is called historical or genetic. Natural science is not satisfied until the most complex animals and plants have been traced back through all their complexities to single cell origins, and, if Browning may be believed, the aim of humane and ethical science too does not rest short of the same effort “to trace love’s faint beginnings in mankind”.

This study of the beginnings is, moreover, not only at the bottom of the method of modern science but of the method of modern teaching. Every man, it is said, in his life history retraces the history of his race, and the race history of man is above all things a history of developing ideas. This has two aspects significant for the method of teaching. As investigating science must trace every complex idea back to its simplest beginnings, so teaching traces the idea forward from those beginnings to its latest form. The law by which man in his individual development of ideas must retrace the history of the race applies to every idea or group of ideas and it is doubtful therefore if any one ever learns anything rightly in life unless he patiently follows the idea of it from its simplest beginnings to its latest form—the path being sometimes a steady growth in value, sometimes a rise and fall again towards extinction. The historical method of teaching, therefore, is the only method which can be called natural.

The other teaching aspect of this matter is the very significant fact in child psychology that the general development of the child’s mind, like the development of its body, does in fact repeat the history of its ancestors as they passed from gestures and cries to articulate speech and writing and through these from the simplest knowledge to the most complex. The child must therefore, in short, be taken along “the paths upon which in a very real sense every human being has come in person” and the natural method of child teaching must consequently be deduced particularly from a study of the beginnings of speech and writing, books and book collections. In a sense, and in a very real sense, the key to the scientific pedagogy of the future lies in the group of studies summed up as library science, for the library is the late and complex object which sums up in itself the sciences of the book, the word, and all simpler elements of human expression and record, if there be any such. A fourth reason for the study of beginnings is, therefore, that it is the natural method of study and teaching.

Finally and closely connected with the preceding reasons is the fact that the purpose of all science is prophecy. We learn not so much that we may teach, as the motto says, but we learn that we may foretell. The object of all science is to understand from what has been the relation of cause and effect in the past, what is likely to be the result of any given set of circumstances in the future. Physics, e.g. has proved a very sure prophetic guide. An engineer can tell with precision that a bridge constructed in a certain way will break if loaded beyond a certain point. Load it to that point and his prophecy becomes true. In the same way, with somewhat less precision perhaps, the biologist can prophesy results in the breeding of plants and animals, the physician can prophesy that quinine will help malaria, the farmer that planted seed under certain conditions will or will not on the average produce certain results, and so on through every branch of human activity. We study in order that we may know the conditions which will be brought about in the future by one or another set of circumstances and so that we may be able to produce the circumstances if we wish the result. The preparation for foretelling may, therefore, be labeled the fifth reason for historical study.