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Referring to the chapter on bibliography for other details, I may here say that the French claim to have reached a highly practical system of classification in that set forth in J. C. Brunet's Manuel du Libraire. This is now generally used in the arrangement of collections of books in France, with some modifications, and the book trade find it so well adapted to their wants, that classified sale and auction catalogues are mostly arranged on that system. It has only five grand divisions: Theology, Law, Arts and Sciences, Belles-lettres, and History. Each of these classes has numerous sub-divisions. For example, geography and voyages and travels form a $1ivision of history, between the philosophy of history and chronology, etc. The classification in use in the Bibliotheque nationale of France places Theology first, followed by Law, History, Philosophy and Belles-lettres. The grand division of Philosophy includes all which is classified under Arts and Sciences in the system of Brunet. In the Library of the British Museum the classification starts with Theology, followed by 2. Jurisprudence; 3. Natural History (including Botany, Geology, Zoology, and Medicine); 4. Art (including Archaeology, Fine Arts, Architecture, Music, and Useful Arts); 5. Philosophy (including Politics, Economics, Sociology, Education, Ethics, Metaphysics, Mathematics, Military and Naval Science, and Chemistry; 6. History (including Heraldry and Genealogy); 7. Geography (including Ethnology); 8. Biography (including Epistles); 9. Belles-lettres (including Poetry, Drama, Rhetoric, Criticism, Bibliography, Collected Works, Encyclopaedias, Speeches, Proverbs, Anecdotes, Satirical and facetious works, Essays, Folklore and. Fiction); 10. Philology. Sub-divisions by countries are introduced in nearly all the classes. In the Library of Congress the classification was originally based upon Lord Bacon's scheme for the division of knowledge into three great classes, according to the faculty of the mind employed in each. 1. History (based upon memory); 2. Philosophy (based upon reason); 3. Poetry (based upon imagination). This scheme was much better adapted to a classification of ideas than of books. Its failure to answer the ends of a practical classification of the library led to radical modifications of the plan, as applied to the books on the shelves, for reasons of logical arrangement, as well as of convenience. A more thorough and systematic re-arrangement is now in progress. Mr. C. A. Cutter has devised a system of "Expansive classification," now widely used in American libraries. In this, the classes are each indicated by a single letter, followed by numbers representing divisions by countries, and these in turn by letters indicating sub-divisions by subjects, etc. It is claimed that this method is not a rigid unchangeable system, but adaptable in a high degree, and capable of modification to suit the special wants of any library. In it the whole range of literature and science is divided into several grand classes, which, with their sub-classes, are indicated by the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Thus Class A embraces Generalia; B to D, Spiritual sciences (including philosophy and religion); E to G, Historical sciences (including, besides history and biography, geography and travels); H to K, Social sciences (including law and political science and economics); L to P, Natural sciences; Q, Medicine; and R to Z, Arts (including not only mechanical, recreative and fine arts, but music, languages, literature, and bibliography). The sub-divisions of these principal classes are arranged with progressive fullness, to suit smaller or larger libraries. Thus, the first classification provides only eleven classes, suited to very small libraries: the second is expanded to fifteen classes, the third to thirty classes, and so on up to the seventh or final one, designed to provide for the arrangement of the very largest libraries. This is the most elaborate and far-reaching library classification yet put forth, claiming superior clearness, flexibility, brevity of notation, logical coordination, etc., while objections have been freely made to it on the score of over-refinement and aiming at the unattainable. What is known as the decimal or the Dewey system of classification was originally suggested by Mr. N. B. Shurtleff's "Decimal system for the arrangement and administration of libraries," published at Boston in 1856. But in its present form it has been developed by Mr. Melvil Dewey into a most ingenious scheme for distributing the whole vast range of human knowledge into ten classes, marked from 0 to 9, each of which sub-divides into exactly ten subclasses, all divisible in their turn into ten minor divisions, and so on until the material in hand, or the ingenuity of the classifier is exhausted. The notation of the books on the shelves corresponds to these divisions and sub-divisions. The claims of this system, which has been quite extensively followed in the smaller American libraries, and in many European ones, are economy, simplicity, brevity of notation, expansibility, unchanging call-numbers, etc.

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