ADDRESS

BEFORE THE

GEORGIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY,

BY

RICHARD D. ARNOLD, M. D.,

MONDAY EVENING,

JULY 24, 1871.

ADDRESS.

Gentlemen of the Georgia Historical and Savannah Library Societies, now consolidated as the Georgia Historical Society: As the intellect is developed by advanced civilization, and consequent larger culture of it, it begins to expand the sphere of its observation. Man, in his savage state, uses his brain for little besides observing and noting the ordinary phenomena of life which are occurring immediately around him. From that point at which the external senses are almost alone the media by which the grey cells of the brain are called upon to act, to that art which, through growth and development by letters, by study, by that incomprehensible function, thought, man, emerged from a savage state, has become a civilized, educated being, more fit to claim having been made in the image of his Maker-what a vast interval! Between two such intellectual extremes, between a Bushman and a Cuvier, the difference is greater as to mind than is the difference materially between a Chimpanzee and the lowest grade of the genus homo.

Among the longings of an intellectually developed people, is that of learning the past as well as the present. Advancing civilization brought into action a mode of preserving the memories of the past with greater capacity and more accuracy, viz: the art of letters; which, however rude and incomplete, constituted the first step towards the development of the human mind. The art of printing formed a proper apex to such a base.

But even with all the profusion of material afforded by the multiplication of documents, and its wide spread dissemination, it is almost wonderful how this material is allowed to go to waste, and become as lost and unavailable as the precious

To avoid this waste, to

Sibylline leaves refused by Numa. preserve this material, libraries, public and private, were formed ages before the invention of printing. But their formation and collection were both more difficult and more expensive than has been the case since the art of printing has been practised. Since that, as communities have become stably established, a library has always been deemed a desideratum amongst them.

A public library combines economy with usefulness. Hence enlightened and public minded men have generally turned their attention to building up and fostering such an institution in their respective communities.

Georgia is the youngest of the Old Thirteen States. While her jurisdiction (confirmed by the treaty of peace between England and the United States, of which she was one after the Revolutionary war), extended to the Mississippi river, at that time her actual settlements did not pass west of the Altamaha and its western tributary the Ocmulgee. In short, Georgia was literally a frontier State, with a sparse population between the Savannah river and the Altamaha. But Savannah and Augusta were established towns, and a flood of emigration set in on the then thinly inhabited State, mostly from Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, in the vicinity of Augusta; but from more northern sources, about Savannah, attracted, no doubt, as the latter were by the commercial advantages of this city from its favored situation.

Our late lamented President, Bishop Elliott, in an address before you but a short time prior to his death, sketched a picture of the literary society of Savannah in the first quarter of this century, and paid a merited tribute to the great intelligence and high culture of the individuals composing it.

In an address delivered by me before the Georgia Medical Society three years ago, I endeavored to pay a tribute to the exertions of my medical predecessors in the cause of medical science and public hygiene.

In my present hasty effort to bring to mind and to fix in your recollections, the names of those who some sixty years since associated themselves together to found a public library for the city of Savannah, I am confined to no