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A GREATER WORK and from 10 A.M. to noon on Saturday. The 1904 catalogue stated that the library now contained 14,105 volumes, which means that it had more than doubled in the preceding thirty-six years. The growth in the societies' libraries was much smaller. Philo's now had 6,473 and Phrena's had 5,624 volumes. The three collections totaled 26,202 volumes, not including several thousand unbound pamphlets. Among Pennsylvania colleges in 1904, Gettysburg's library holdings ranked with those of Lafayette (23,600), Bucknell (25,000), Swarthmore (22,375), and Pennsylvania State College (21,300). They were behind those of Dickinson (36,000), Franklin and Marshall (39,400), and Haverford (43,000).153 In the 1890s, writers for College publications and others demonstrated repeatedly that they were satisfied with neither the library nor student use of it. "Now of course Gettysburg is not a university," said the Gettysburgian on February 8, 1899, "but it should make claims, to be nothing less than a first-class college." To validate those claims, it needed a library of 40,000 to 50,000 volumes, which would require a much larger annual expenditure than the accustomed one. Several months earlier, on October 19, 1898, in the same publication, a writer wondered whether a larger and better library collection would indeed be used. "A somewhat continued observation," he wrote, "has led us to estimate that not more than twenty-five per cent of the men are making anything like a proper use of the advantages the libraries afford. This condition is so far from being right that it is entirely wrong." In a day of "broad reading and close research," with the library at hand, and with the time available, "failure to make proper use of the books becomes almost a crime." If the upperclassmen refuse to set a good example for the freshmen, the writer argued, then the latter should set it for everyone else. Equipment The first part of the instructional program to be given separate mention in the catalogue was what was ambitiously called the Department of Physical Science. Announcement was made in 1867 that "during the past scholastic year the efficiency of this department of the College has been greatly increased, by the addition of a complete collection of Philosophical Apparatus" and also that "a superior Telescope has recently come into possession of the College, and will soon be mounted and ready for the use of the students in 153Report of the Commissioner (1904), 2:1520-1522. In 1900 the College library was receiving about fifty newspapers and periodicals. 31