摘要：The text of this brief sermon is found in Sir William Osler's address, "The Library School and the College," and reads as follows: "A final word from one student to another. Your business is that of purveyors, universal providers of the mental food of the public; and not only are you caterers but you will often be called upon to do the work of cooks and doctors. The majority of mankind, as Burke says, providence has doomed to live on trust,a trust less in you, I fear, than in the ephemeral literature of the day. It is not often that. one has a vivid, enduring impression of a newspaper article; but one day in October, 1872, in a Tottenham Court Road teashop, I read in The Times, a statement of Ruskin to the effect that no mind could resist for a year the dulling influence of the daily paper. Doubtless as an exclusive dietary the press and the magazine do lead to mental conditions the counterpart of what we know in the body as the deficiency diseases, scurvy, rickets, etc. The library through you supplies the vitamines which counteract the mental lethargy and anemia which come from to exclusive use of Northcliffe and other patent foods. You have a great opportunity-see that you rise to it. . . . We no longer lay our disposition to the charge of a star-a man is his own star. Strive for mental accuracy and independence, cultivate the critical investigating faculty. . . . In a profession demanding an amazing measure of equanimity, you cannot afford either to fight or to fret. Too genuinely interested in your fellow-creatures to be vexed wvith their vagaries, you will find the highest happiness in life to be an unselfish devotion to their interests. 'I am among you as one that serveth,' is the motto today of the sensible man who wishes to escape from the mental and moral worries of this muchperplexed world, and I give it as a prescription especially suited to the librarian.
