diseased bodily constitutions, have rapidly improved in health
when circumstances have allowed the free exercise of their
intellectual powers, and have finally attained a maturity
vigorous alike in body and mind. This is in the nature of a
digression, but it can do no harm to call attention thus to the
facts which contradict the common notion that intellectual
precocity should be discouraged. Nature is the best guide, and it
is in accordance with all her workings, that when she has in hand
the production of a giant of intellect, the young Hercules should
astonish observers by feats of strength even in his cradle. Let
not the public library, then, be found working against nature by
establishing, as far as its influence goes, a dead level of
intellectual attainments for all persons below a certain age.

But there is a much larger class of young persons who ought not
to be excluded from the library, not because they have decided
intellectual cravings and are mentally mature, but because they
have capacities for the cultivation of good tastes, and because
the cultivation of such tastes cannot be begun too early. There
is no greater mistake in morals than that often covered by the
saying, harmless enough literally, "Boys will be boys." This
saying is used perhaps oftener than for any other purpose to
justify boys in doing things which are morally not fit for men to
do, and is thus the expression of that great error that
immoralities early in life are to be expected and should not be
severely deprecated. The same misconception of the relations of
youth to maturity and of nature's great laws of growth and
development is seen in that common idea that children need not be
expected to have any literary tastes; that they may well be
allowed to confine their reading to the frivolous, the merely