To direct public attention to a neglected subject is one of the main objects of the Index Society; but although Indexes to new books may be demanded from publishers, it is hardly to be expected that these merchants in literature will index books of the past. There are a large number of standard works to which students must frequently refer, which are a source of constant irritation from the difficulty of finding what is required in their voluminous pages. The county and local histories, in the possession of which England is so rich, rank high in the list of these—a list which would also contain the Standard Historical Collections, such as those of Rushworth, and Nalson, the Harleian Miscellany, Somers’ Tracts, Ellis’s Original Letters, and many other books that it is needless to enumerate here.[27] To this department the Society will devote special attention. In all cases a book that may be considered as the authority upon a given subject will have the preference, so that the Indexes may serve as complete guides to the various topics. In many instances the works of standard authors will be indexed as a whole, and in this way Indexes to particular books or authors will often be Subject Indexes as well. With these and Subject Indexes referring to Books and Papers in British and Foreign Journals and Transactions, it is hoped that in a few years the Society will have accumulated and published a series of books that will be of real service to all classes of readers.

Much that would otherwise be neglected may be done by a public society, but to attack with effect the mass of work waiting to be undertaken, it is necessary that we should receive a hearty support. It is to the interest of subscribers to make the objects of the Society widely known, and otherwise to help it, because the more numerous the subscribers the larger will be the return that each subscriber will get for his subscription, and the larger the plot of the great field that can be put under cultivation. It is expected that the work of the Society will be largely extended when they acquire funds that will enable them to open an office which shall contain a library of indexes, and in which can be placed the General Reference Index.

I have heard two objections brought against the scheme of the Society:

1. That it is needless to urge the compilation of indexes, because every worker worthy of the name makes his own. This, however, is just the loss of power that the Society wish to prevent. Now the same work is often done over and over again, and the MSS. are only saved from the waste-paper basket by the merest chance, to be again lost among a heap of other papers. There are, doubtless, many valuable indexes lying hidden and unknown, and it will be our object to draw them if possible to the light.

2. That the General Index is an impossibility, and that to attempt its preparation is a waste of time. Those who hold this opinion have not sufficient faith in the simplicity and usefulness of the alphabet. Every one has notes and references of some kind, which are useless if kept unarranged, but if sorted into alphabetical order become valuable. The object of the General Index is just this, that anything, however disconnected, can be placed there, and much that would otherwise be lost will there find a resting place. Always growing and never pretending to be complete, the Index will be useful to all, and its consulters will be sure to find something worth their trouble if not all they may require.

The objects of the Society are national in their importance, and as such they have been acknowledged by one who has given one hundred guineas to help in their attainment. With more such gifts how much might be done by the Society.

Having dwelt in the previous pages upon some of the chief points in the history of Indexing, we will now pass on to the consideration of the practical part of the subject. The unwise seem to be of opinion that any fool can index, but we have already seen that the wise think differently. The remarks with which Dr. Johnson opens the preface to his English Dictionary may well be applied to the Indexer: “It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science, the pioneer of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths through which Learning and Genius press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompence has been yet granted to very few.” This dishonouring estimate has received many rude shocks, and it should be our aim to crush it entirely out of existence.

In order to give some appearance of system to what might otherwise be considered as mere desultory remarks, I propose to arrange the following notes under the three heads of I. Compilation; II. Arrangement; III. Printing.

I.

In the Instructions for an Index to the Statute Law, by Sir Henry Thring,[28] already referred to, we find the following clear definitions which will serve to open this portion of our case:—

The question naturally arises—how is the work to be set about? In the Special Report on the Public Libraries of the United States of America, Part I, 1876 (pp. 727-732), is an article on “Book Indexes” by F. B. Perkins, which contains some rather elementary instruction as to writing, cutting up, and pasting, but in these matters of detail the best way of proceeding will always be the way that the indexer feels that he can work best. Some choose to write their Index straight on in the order of the book itself, on sheets of paper which are afterwards cut up, sorted, and pasted; others prefer to use slips of paper and to write one entry on each slip; a third class will make their entries at once into an alphabetical book, or better still on loose sheets of paper placed in a portfolio lettered in alphabetical order. By this means the indexer sees his work grow under his hands. Whatever system however is adopted, it is well to bear in mind that the indexer should obtain some knowledge of the book he is about to Index before he commences his work. The following remarks by Sir H. Thring may be applied more generally than to the law—“A complete knowledge of the whole law is required before he begins to make the index, for until he can look down on the entire field of law before him, he cannot possibly judge of the proper arrangement of the headings, or of the relative importance of the various provisions.”

During his work the Indexer must constantly ask himself what it is for which the consulter is likely to seek. The author frequently uses periphrases to escape from the repetition of the same fact in the same form, but these periphrases will give little information when inserted as headings in an Index, and it is in this point of selecting the best catchword that the good Indexer will show his superiority over the commonplace worker. There are a large number of Indexes in which not only is the best heading not chosen but the very worst is. Thus in the Indexes to the Canadian Journal, a high-class magazine, we find such entries as the following, arranged under the word here printed in italics:—

The same arrangement may be found in the Index to the Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers, thus—

The handsome edition of Jewel’s Apology by Isaacson (1825) contains an index which is worthy of special remark. It is divided into four alphabets, referring respectively to 1. Life; 2. Apology; 3. Notes to Life; 4. Notes to Apology; and this complicated machinery is attached to a book of only 286 pages. I think I may say that there is hardly an entry in the Index that would be of any use to the consulter, and to show that this censure is not too sweeping, I will add a few specimens:

In the “General Index to the Spectators, Tatlers and Guardians,” referred to on a previous page, such words as Difference, Digression, Directions, Discourse, Dissertation and Instance, are specially noticed as bad headings in the original Indexes, which have been changed in the new one; and yet these are the very words that are chosen by rule for headings in the British Museum Catalogue. Could any plan be adopted by which the following books would more thoroughly be hidden out of sight than by the present arrangement:

Some bibliographers always prefer substantives to adjectives as headings, but the whole point of a sentence is often contained in a substantival adjective. When adjective and substantive are joined to represent one idea, as Alimentary Canal, English History, they should be treated as compound nouns, and arranged under the letters A and E respectively.[29] The most marked example of an opposite rule that I have ever seen is to be found in the Index to Hare’s Walks in London (1878). Here all the Alleys, Bridges, Buildings, Churches, Courts, Houses, Streets, etc., are arranged under those headings, and not under the proper name of each. There may be a certain advantage in some of these headings, but few would look for Lisson Grove under Grove, and the climax of absurdity is reached when Chalk Farm is placed under Farm. The adopted rule is not rigidly carried out, for Grey Friars will be found under G, and Austin Friars under F. Another peculiarity of this index is that a copy of it is added to each volume.

Books of facts are much easier indexed than books of opinion; but it is most important that the contents of the latter should be properly registered. Some indexers seem to be of opinion that proper names are the most important items in an index, and while carefully including all these, they omit facts and opinions of much greater importance. As a rule it is objectionable when the consulter finds no additional information in the book to what is already given in the index; for instance, should the observation be made respecting a certain state of mind that “the Duke of Wellington probably felt the same at the Battle of Waterloo,” it will be well for the indexer to pass the remark by unnoticed, as should he make the following entries, the consulter is not likely to be in a very genial mood when he looks up the references:

The hackneyed quotation of

cannot be omitted here, although I am unable to give any satisfactory account of its origin. It forms an excellent example of the useless references to which we have just referred, and contains as well a ludicrous misapprehension of the passage indexed, which is said to have been: “Mr. Justice Best said that he had a great mind to commit the man for trial.” There can be no doubt that the entry, whether it ever occurred in an Index or not, was intended as a personal fling against Sir William Draper Best, puisne judge of the King’s Bench from 1819 to 1824, and Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas from 1824 to 1829, in which latter year he resigned, and was created Lord Wynford. The story was told to Mr. Solly by Sir W. Domville, in 1825, and with reference to the index to one of Chitty’s Law Books. Another friend tells me that he has a faint recollection that Chitty had a grudge against Best, and took an opportunity of expending his bile in this entry; but the late Dr. Doran insisted that the author of the joke was Leigh Hunt, who first published it in the Examiner. In this unsettled state we must leave the question, for it is not worth while to search the files of a newspaper in order to find the truth of so insignificant a matter.

The form in which the various entries in an index are to be drawn up is worthy of much attention, and particular care should be taken to expunge all redundant words. For instance, it will be better to write

Sometimes a characteristic adjective or adverb will help to give life and interest to the Index.

The indexer must aim at conciseness, but he should always specify the cause of reference, more especially in the case of proper names.[30] Few things are more annoying than to find a block list of references after a name, so that the consulter has to search through many pages before he can find what he seeks.[31] Mr. Markland draws particular attention to this point in a communication to the Notes and Queries (2nd series, vol. vii. p. 469) on the subject of Indexes. He complains bitterly of the Indexes to the collected edition of Walpole’s Letters and to Scott’s Swift. In the latter book there are 638 references to Harley, Earl of Oxford, without any indication of the reason why his name is entered in the Index. This case also affords a good instance of careless indexing in another particular, for these references are separated under different headings, instead of being gathered under one, as follows—

Mr. Markland takes the opportunity of pointing out that good specimens of the right way to set out the references to an individual are to be found in Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes; Hallam’s Constitutional History; and Campbell’s Lives of the Lord Chancellors. Probably the most colossal instance of the fault above alluded to is to be found in Ayscough’s elaborate Index to the Gentleman’s Magazine, where all the references under one surname are placed together without even the distinction of the Christian name. Mr. Solly made a curious calculation as to the time that would be employed in looking up these references. For instance, under the name Smith, there are 2411 entries, all “en masse,” and with no initial letters. If there were these divisions, one would find “Zachary Smith” in a few minutes, but now one must look to each reference to find what is wanted. With taking down the volumes, and hunting through long lists of names, Mr. Solly found that each reference cost him two minutes of time, a by no means extravagant estimate; hence it would take the consulter eight days (working steadily ten hours a day) to find out if there be any note about Zachary Smith in the Magazine, a task so awful to think of that it may be presumed that no one will ever attempt it.

In some books a man will merely be referred to as holding an acre of land, or as having been seen by the author on a certain day. In these instances a specific cause of reference can hardly be given, but the difficulty may be got over by setting out the various entries in which some fact or opinion is mentioned, and then gathering together the remainder under the heading of Alluded to.

One would imagine that correctness of reference was the sine qua non of an index, and yet careless compilers, to save themselves trouble, have sometimes neglected this great essential. Books have been published with indexes that contained no reference at all, and until late years glossaries have usually been compiled without references to the places where the different words are used.

Mr. Peacock has drawn my attention to the reprint of Whitelock’s Memorials, published by the University of Oxford in 1853. The original edition is in one volume folio (1682, reprinted 1732), and the new edition is in four volumes octavo, but, to save expense, the old index was printed to the new book. The difficulty was in part got over by giving the pages of the 1732 edition in the margin; but, as may be imagined, it is a most troublesome business to find anything by it. If the old index were a good one, there might be some excuse for its retention; but it is thoroughly bad, and all the mere misprints are retained in the new one. As a specimen of the extreme inaccuracy of the compilation, it may be mentioned that under one heading of 34 entries Mr. Peacock detected seven blunders, and, moreover, he does not think that this is at all an unfavourable specimen. Although Mr. Peacock has no statistics of the other entries, his experience leads him to believe that if any heading were taken at random, about one in four of the entries would be found to be misprinted.

An extreme case of misleading references is given in the Index of Authors appended to the old Classified Catalogue of the Library of Congress (Washington, 1840). The references here are not to pages but to chapters, and as some of the chapters extend over one hundred pages it may be guessed that a very tedious search has to be made; for instance, to find the reference Abdy, it is necessary to look over as many as seventy pages.

It has been said that a bad index is better than no index at all, but this is open to question, as the incomplete index deceives the consulter. We have fair warning of this incompleteness in The Register of Corpus Christi Guild, York, published by the Surtees Society in 1872, where we read on p. 321—“This Index contains the names of all persons mentioned in the Appendix and foot-notes, but a selection only is given of those who were admitted into the Guild or enrolled in the Obituary.” The plan here adopted is not to be commended, for it is clear that so important a name-list as this is should be thoroughly indexed. However learned and judicious an editor may be, we do not choose to submit to his judgment in the offhand decision of what is, and what is not—unimportant.

Many of the best indexes are indexes and something more; that is, information is added which may not be in the book itself, such as the date of birth and death of the persons mentioned, in order to distinguish between those bearing the same proper names. Mr. Ralph Thomas has added to his interesting notice of Quérard[32] (a pamphlet of 48 pages), an Index of eight pages. This index contains several such entries as the following:—

The Index of Authors appended to De Morgan’s Arithmetical Books, 1847, includes a list of reported Authors of works on Arithmetic which are not noticed in the book, but these of course have no mark of reference. By this means the Index shows the deficiencies of the book as well as its riches. It is needful, however, that the information added should be correct. An important example of the effect of wrong indexing is given in Merewether and Stephens’s “History of Boroughs and Municipal Corporations.” The word “Incorporation” is introduced into the index of the Patent Rolls without authority from the text, and long before there were incorporations in this country. The first actual use of the term is in the Charter of Incorporation of Hull (18. Henr. VI.), but upon the error in this index many other blunders have been founded.

The Indexer needs knowledge so as to be able to correct his author when necessary, for the most careful author will make slips occasionally, and it is highly satisfactory when the Indexer can set him right. He needs to be specially upon his guard in the case of misprints. Probably the most fruitful source of blundering is the confusion of the letters u and n. These are identical in old MSS., and consequently the copyist sometimes finds it difficult to decide which he shall use. In Capgrave’s Chronicle of England is a reference to the “londe of Iude” [Judæa], but this is mis-spelt Inde in the edition published in the Master of the Rolls’ series in 1858. Here we have a simple misprint which can easily be set right, but the Indexer has enlarged it into a wonderful blunder. Under the letter I is the following curious piece of information:—

Many more instances of this confusion of the letters u and n might be given here, but two will suffice. George London was a very eminent horticulturist in his day, who, at the Revolution, was appointed Superintendent of the Royal Gardens, but he can seldom get his name properly spelt, because a later horticulturist has made the name Loudon more familiar. The reverse mistake was one made by the Duke of Wellington. C. J. Loudon (whose handwriting was not very legible) wrote to the Duke a request that he might see the Waterloo beeches at Stratfieldsaye. The letter puzzled the Duke, who knew nothing of the horticulturist, and read C. J. Loudon as C. J. London and beeches as breeches; so he wrote off to Bishop Blomfield that his Waterloo breeches disappeared long ago.

The worst blunders are not made by the ignorant, but by those who think themselves clever and jump to unwarranted conclusions; for instance, the compiler of a history of Norwich attributed a work on the Differential Calculus by a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, to a medical practitioner of the town; but in order to make the subject more appropriate, he inserted the information in the following form—“to our respected fellow-townsman Mr. Arthur Brown we are indebted for a valuable treatise on different calculi”! There are few mistakes easier fallen into by Cataloguers and Indexers than that of rolling two men into one, and few blunders are less easily forgiven by the objects of the confusion; thus Bishop Jebb is said to have been in dismay when he found himself identified in Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica with his uncle the Unitarian writer. In Dircks’s Worcesteriana (1866) there is a curious muddle of this kind. The first reprint of the Marquis of Worcester’s Century of Inventions was issued by Thomas Payne, the highly respected bookseller of the Mews Gate, in 1746, but Mr. Dircks positively asserts that the “notorious Tom Paine” was the publisher of it, thus ignoring the different spelling of the two names.

A curious instance of uniting two men into one will be found in the Athenæum for May 13, 1871, where we read that “William Haidinger von Franz Ritter v. Hauer, the geologist and mineralogist, has died recently.” What is here supposed to be one name is really the title of a biography of Haidinger by von Hauer.

There are a considerable number of names which have been created through the misreading of difficult words, and names of persons who never existed have by this means found their way into Biographical Dictionaries. In the Zoological Bibliography of Agassiz, there is an imaginary author, by name J. K. Broch, whose work, “Entomologische Briefe,” was published in 1823. This pamphlet is anonymous, and written by one who signed himself J. K. Broch. is merely an explanation in the catalogue from which the entry was taken, that it was a brochure. Moreri created an author whom he styled “Dorus Basilicus” out of the title of James the First’s Δωρον βασιλικον, and Bishop Walton supposed the title of the great Arabic Dictionary, the Kamoos, or Ocean, to be the name of an author whom he quotes as “Camus.” In the Biographie Universelle there is a life of one “Nicholas Donis” by Baron Walckenaer, that name being a mere blundering alteration of “Dominus Nicholas,” this Benedictine monk’s true appellation. Thevenot, in his Travels, refers to the fables of “Damné et Calilve,” meaning the Hitopadesa or Pilpay’s Fables. His translator calls them the fables of the damned Calilve. This is on a par with De Quincey’s specimen of a French Abbé’s Greek. Having to paraphrase the words “Ἡροδοτος και ιαζων,” (Herodotus even while Ionicizing), the Frenchman rendered them “Herodote et aussi Jazon,” thus creating a new author, one Jazon.[33] In the Present State of Peru, a compilation from the Mercurio Peruano, P. Geronymo Roman de la Higuera is transformed into “Father Geronymo, a Romance of La Higuera”! Well may we say to the worthy priest what Peter Quince said to Bottom, “Bless thee, bless thee, thou art translated.”

The scissors-and-paste compilers are peculiarly liable to such errors as these, and Wilson Croker proved in the Quarterly Review that the Mémoires de Louis XVIII. (published in 1832) was a mendacious compilation from the Mémoires de Bachaumont by giving examples of the compiler’s blundering. One of these muddles is well worth quoting, and it occurs in the following passage: “Seven bishops—of Puy, Gallard de Terraube; of Langres, La Luzerne; of Rhodez, Seignelay-Colbert; of Gast, Le Tria; of Blois, Laussiere Themines; of Nancy, Fontanges; of Alais, Beausset; of Nevers, Seguiran.” Had the compiler taken the trouble to count his own list, he would have seen that he had given eight names instead of seven, and so have suspected that something was wrong; but he was not paid to think. The fact is that there is no such place as Gast, and was no such person as Le Tria. The Bishop of Rhodez was Seignelay-Colbert de Castle Hill, a descendant of the Scotch family of Cuthbert of Castle Hill, in Inverness-shire, and Bachaumont misled his successor by writing Gast Le Hill for Castle Hill. The introduction of a stop and a little misspelling originated the blunder as we now find it.

An author is sometimes turned into a place, as in the article on Stenography in Rees’s Cyclopædia. John Nicolai published a Treatise on the Signs of the Ancients at the beginning of the last century, and the writer of the article having seen it stated that a certain fact was to be found in Nicolai, jumped to the conclusion that it was the name of a place and wrote: “It was at Nicolai that this method of writing was first introduced to the Greeks by Xenophon himself.”

D’Israeli gives a few curious instances of supposed authors in his Curiosities of Literature—“A book was written in praise of Ciampini by Ferdinand Fabiani, who quoting a French narrative of travels in Italy, took for the name of the author the following words, found at the end of the title-page, Enrichi de deux Listes; that is, ‘Enriched with two Lists:’ on this he observes ‘that Mr. Enriched with two Lists has not failed to do that justice to Ciampini which he merited.’ The abridgers of Gesner’s Bibliotheca ascribe the romance of Amadis to one Acuerdo Olvido: Remembrance, Oblivion. Not knowing that these two words on the title-page of the French version of that book formed the translator’s Spanish motto. D’Aquin, the French King’s physician, in his memoir on the preparation of Bark, takes Mantissa, which is the title of the Appendix to the History of Plants by Johnstone, for the name of an author, and who he says is so extremely rare, that he only knows him by name.” To these may be added S. Viar, whose existence was supposed to be proved by an inscription until an antiquary showed that the complete reading of the mutilated stone was

præfectuS . VIARum.

Also the August Oriuna, supposed to be the wife of Carausius, of whom Dr. Stukeley wrote some theoretical memoirs. This blunder originated in the credulous Doctor’s misreading of the inscription on a battered coin of Carausius:—

ORIVNA AVG . for FORTVNA AVG.

The French often fall into this class of blunders from their constant practice of translating or explaining whatever it is supposed can be translated or explained, thus G. Brunet of Bordeaux, having occasion in his “La France Littéraire au XVe Siècle,” to mention “White Knights,” the seat of the Duke of Marlborough, translates it “Le Chevalier Blanc.”[34] When Dr. Buckland, the distinguished geologist, died, a certain French paper published a biography of him, in which it was explained that the deceased had been a very versatile writer, for besides his works on Geology, he had produced one, “Sur les ponts et chaussées.” This was a puzzle at first, but it was soon found that the Bridgewater Treatise was here alluded to. The French love of translation and explanation is amusingly illustrated in the Annuaire des Sociétés Savantes, par le Cte. Achmet d’Hericourt, 1863, where the author, in his notice of the Geological and Polytechnic Society of the West Riding of Yorkshire, says that as it is known that the English word Ride means a “voyage à cheval ou en voiture,” it might be thought that this was a “Société hippique,” but he obligingly adds that it is not so.

We have already seen in several cases how dangerous it is to jump to conclusions, but we have still to point out the particular danger of filling out contractions without sufficient knowledge. Pope, in a note on Measure for Measure, informs us that the story was taken from Giraldi Cinthio’s novel Dec. 8, Nov. 5, thus contracting the words Decade and Novel. Warburton, in his edition of Shakespeare, was misled by these contractions, and filled them out as December 8, and November 5. An error of the same kind is made by Dr. Allibone in his Dictionary of English Literature, under the heading of Isaac Disraeli. He notices new editions of that author’s works revised by the Right Hon. the Chancellor of the Exchequer, of course Isaac’s son Benjamin (now Earl of Beaconsfield and Prime Minister); but unfortunately there were two Chancellors in 1858, and Allibone chooses the wrong one, printing as information to the reader that the reviser was Sir George Cornewall Lewis. But still worse was the following emendation of an ‘intelligent’ printer. A writer in one of the reviews sent his copy to press with the contraction “J. C. first invaded Britain,” and the compositor, who made it his business to fill up all such abbreviations, instead of Julius Cæsar, set up Jesus Christ.[35]

Next in importance to the selection of appropriate headings in an Index is the careful use of cross references. Great judgment is here required, as the consulters are naturally irritated by being referred backwards and forwards, particularly in a large Index. At the same time, if judiciously inserted, such references are a great help. When the entries are short and few, it is better to repeat them than to refer from one to the other. In the case of long entries cross references are very advantageous, and it is always well to refer to cognate headings.[36] This, however, must not be carried too far; for, as Mr. Poole says in an article on his own index,[37] “If every subject shall have cross references to its allies, the work will be mainly a book of cross references rather than an index of subjects.” He adds, “One correspondent gives fifty-eight cross references under Mental Philosophy, and fifty-eight more might be added just as appropriate.”

At all events let the cross references be real. In Eadie’s Dictionary of the Bible (1850), there is a reference “Dorcas see Tabitha,” but there is no entry under Tabitha at all.

No reference to the contents of a general heading which is without subdivision should be allowed.[38] There are too many of these vague cross references in the Penny Cyclopædia, where you are referred from the known to the unknown. If a general heading be divided into sections, and each of these be clearly defined, they should be cross referenced, but not otherwise. At present you may look for Pesth and be referred to Hungary, where probably there is much about Pesth, but you do not know where to look for it in the long article without clue. Sometimes cross references are mere expedients, particularly in the case of a cyclopædia published in volumes or numbers. Thus a writer agrees to contribute an article early in the alphabet, but is not ready in time for the publication of the part, so a cross reference is inserted which sends the reader to a synonym later on in the alphabet. In certain cases this has been done two or three times. In Cobbett’s Woodlands there is a good specimen of backwards and forwards cross referencing. The author writes: “Many years ago I wished to know whether I could raise birch trees from the seed.... I then looked into the great book of knowledge, the Encyclopædia Britannica; there I found in the general dictionary—

I hastened to Betula with great eagerness and there I found—

That was all, and this was pretty encouragement.”

Cross referencing has its curiosities as well as other branches of our subject. Perhaps the most odd collection of cross references are to be found in Hawkins’s Pleas of the Crown, of which it was said in the Monthly Magazine for June, 1801 (p. 419) “A plain unlettered man is led to suspect that the writer of the volume and the writer of the index are playing at cross purposes.” The following are some of the most amusing entries, but there are many more as good:

The Index to Ford’s Handbook of Spain contains an amusing reference—

Wellington, see Duke.

But perhaps the strangest place to find a cross reference is on a tombstone. In Barnes churchyard the following inscription was put up to a once famous actor:—

Mr. J. Moody
A native of the Parish of Saint Clement Danes
and an old Member of Drury Lane Theatre.
For his Memoirs see the European Magazine; for his professional
abilities see Churchill’s Rosciad.
Obiit Dec. 26 1812,
Anno Ætatis 85.

II.

Intimately connected with compilation is arrangement, for however well the contents of a book may be analysed, the result will not form a good Index unless it is well arranged.

An Index should be one and indivisible, and not broken up into several alphabets, thus every work ought to have its complete Index whether it is one volume or many.[39] This important rule has frequently been neglected in English books, and is almost universally rejected in Foreign ones, to the great inconvenience of readers. An Index may be arranged either chronologically, alphabetically, or according to classes, but great confusion will be caused by uniting the three. The alphabetical arrangement is so simple, so convenient, and so easily understood by all, that it has naturally superseded the other forms, but some still cling to the rags of classification, in the belief that that is a more scientific arrangement. The evil of this is that the consulter is never sure whether the reference he requires may not be lurking in some place that he has missed, but in the case of a single alphabet an answer to the question “Does the Index contain what I require?” is obtained at once. Classification is the reverse of this, for, as Mr. Poole says in his observations on the proposal of one of his helpers to place Wealth, Finance, and Population under the head of Political Economy—“the fatal defect of every classified arrangement is that nobody understands it except the person who made it and he is often in doubt.” The general principle here enunciated will perhaps be better understood by reference to a few examples. Brayley’s Surrey, in five volumes, has a separate Index to each volume, and it is a pretty general experience that whatever is wanted is sure to be found in the last volume consulted. The new edition of Hutchins’s Dorset, 1874, has at the end eight separate Indexes, 1. Places; 2. Pedigrees; 3. Persons; 4. Arms; 5. Blazons; 6. Glossarial; 7. Domesday; 8. Inquisitions. How much thought is here required which would not be needed were all united into one alphabet. The general Index to the Reports of the British Association is a most inconvenient one to use, as it is split up into six alphabets; but the evil of these subdivisions is most marked in Indexes to the various volumes of the Athenæum, which are so subdivided that they are practically useless. Who would rack his brain to find under which of the many headings the subject he requires is likely to be hidden? These divided Indexes are the exception in English books, but abroad almost every Index is in two parts: 1. Persons; 2. Things. The Index to Arago’s complete works has the threefold division: 1. Auteurs; 2. Cosmique; 3. Matières. If this division be made, it ought surely to be carried out correctly, and yet in the Autoren Register to Carus’ and Engelmann’s Bibliography of Zoology may be found the following entries: Schreiben; Schriften; Zu Humboldts Cosmos; Zur Fauna.

The inconveniences of classification in an index are so palpable that it is needless to add more, but a list of titles of books that have given trouble to bibliographers, and at sundry times have been misarranged, will perhaps be amusing. Edgeworth’s Essay on Irish Bulls and a Treatise on the Great Seal have been placed under the heading of Zoology; Napier’s Bones under Anatomy; Swinburne’s Under the Microscope under Optical Instruments; a volume of Poems, entitled the Viol and Lute, under Musical Instruments; Ruskin’s Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds under Agriculture; McEwen on the Types under Printing; and most famous of all, Link, de Stellis Marinis, under Astronomy. Disraeli reports an amusing anecdote of “an honest friar who compiled a church history and placed in the class of ecclesiastical writers Guarini, the Italian poet; this arose from a most risible blunder: on the faith of the title of his celebrated amorous pastoral Il Pastor Fido, ‘The Faithful Shepherd,’ our good father imagined that the character of a curate, vicar, or bishop, was represented in this work.”

Such incongruities as these had a charm for the author of the Curiosities of Literature, and he therefore devotes a chapter to the “Titles of Books.” The foregoing are tempting subjects for the jumpers to conclusions, but some titles are impenetrable—what, for instance, can be made of Labia Dormientum? It turns out to be a Catalogue of rabbinical writers, and was so called in reference to a passage in Solomon’s Song, “Like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak” (vii. 19).

In order to help the makers of Indexes in judging of the relative extent of the various letters of the Alphabet certain calculations have been made,[40] but the statistics must vary greatly according to the character of the Index. Thus B is the largest in an Index of English names, but loses its preeminence in an Index of subjects, and S takes high rank in both classes.

Mr. Curtis advocates in his paper the arrangement under each initial letter according to the next following vowel, a plan often adopted in Locke’s and other Common Place Books, but which is highly inconvenient, especially when words without a second vowel as Ash and Epps are placed at the head of each letter, as Ash before Adam and Abel; and Epps before Ebenezer.

In arranging entries in alphabetical order it is necessary to sort them up to the most minute difference of spelling. In order to save themselves trouble some workers think they may leave off sorting at the third letter, and their idleness gives others much annoyance. I have often been troubled in this way when consulting the Index to a large map of England in which the names of places are not arranged further than the third letter.

The Alphabetical arrangement has its difficulties which must be overcome; for instance, it looks awkward when the plural comes before the singular, and the adjective before the substantive from which it is formed, as naval and navies before navy.

Another difficulty arises when names and words from a foreign language are introduced into an English Index. The only safe rule in these cases is to use the English alphabet.[41] One of the Rules of the American Library Association is, “The German ae, oe, ue are always to be written ä, ö, ü, and arranged as a, o, u”; by this Goethe would have to be written Göthe, which is now an unusual form, and I think it would be better to insist that where both forms are used, one or other should be chosen and all instances spelt alike. It is a very common practice to arrange ä, ö, ü, as if they were written ae, oe, ue, but this leads to the greatest confusion, and no notice should be taken of letters that are merely to be understood. Those who have stumbled over the arrangement that treats the vowel I and consonant J, and the vowel U and consonant V, as identical, will be glad to have a rule that keeps them distinct.

Although it has been previously said that words and names must be arranged in alphabet up to their last letters, it is necessary to bear in mind that each word is to stand by itself; for instance, first will come the various persons bearing the surname Grave, arranged according to the order of their Christian names,