It is of course perfectly possible that hitches and breakings down might at first occur from time to time, from the delicacy of the machine employed, or from other causes. The machines have not been properly tested, nor can they be, except by a continuous course of experiment. But whence this morbid fear of experiment? After Darwin's definition, the apprehension should surely be on the other side. A single machine, kept at work for a week, would be sufficient to test the principle. The first experiments with the electric light at the Museum were anything but promising, but Sir Edward Bond persevered, and the result is what we see.
And how brilliant a result the establishment of telegraphic communication would be! The saving of time is no doubt the most practical consideration, but apart from this, how vast the improvement in the economy of the Reading Room! No more troops of boy attendants, with the inevitable noise and bustle; nothing but the invisible messenger speeding on his silent errand, and the quiet delivery of books at the desks: an unparalleled scene of perfect physical repose in the midst of intense mental activity. Of course the improvement would not stop with the Reading Room, and ere long all departments would be connected by the writing telegraph.
This paper, of course, is not written with any view of recommending the Telautograph. Instruments better adapted for the purpose may exist, although the writer has not met with them. He originally proposed the employment of a printing telegraph as a means of abridging delays in the Reading Room as long ago as 1876. The great improvements in administration introduced at that time, however, rendered the need less urgent; nor, perhaps, was electrical science itself then sufficiently developed. Acquaintance with the Telautograph led him to take the subject up again in 1893 and 1894, and he still hopes to find the electric force a match for _vis inertiæ_.
Of all the library's enemies, the most terrible is fire. Water is bad enough; is it not recorded that the 450 copies of the Bible Society's translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew into Manchu, printed on the soft silken paper of China, were destroyed by an inundation of the Neva? But such damage can rarely occur, unless when the element of the Sylph is invoked to combat the element of the Salamander. The muddy waters of the Neva, also, were probably more pernicious than the "salt sea streams" would have been. We ourselves have transcribed manuscripts of Shelley's which had been for months at the bottom of the Mediterranean, and which, although protected by package, had evidently been soaked with salt water. Exposure to fire for a hundred-thousandth part of the period would not have left a letter legible.